I am convinced that the natives of India cannot respect a European who mixes with them familiarly, or especially who imitates their customs, manners, and dress.  The tight pantaloons, the authoritative voice, the pococurante manner, and the broken Hindustani impose upon them-have a weight which learning and honesty, which wit and courage, have not.  This is to them the master’s attitude:  they bend to it like those Scythian slaves that faced the sword but fled from the horsewhip.  Such would never be the case amongst a brave people, the Afghan for instance; and for the same reason it is not so, we read, with “White Plume,” the North American Indian.  “The free trapper combines in the eye of an Indian (American) girl, all that is dashing and heroic in a warrior of her own race, whose gait and garb and bravery he emulates, with all that is gallant and glorious in the white man.”  There is but one cause for this phenomenon; the “imbelles Indi” are still, with few exceptions,[FN#17] a cowardly and slavish people, who would raise themselves by depreciating those superior to them in the scale of creation.  The Afghans and American aborigines, being chivalrous races, rather exaggerate the valour of their foes, because by so doing they exalt their own.[FN#18]

[FN#1] Villages notorious for the peculiar Egyptian revelry, an undoubted relic of the good old times, when “the most religious of men” revelled at Canopus with an ardent piety in honour of Isis and Osiris. [FN#2] “Haykal” was a pleasant fellow, who, having basely abused the confidence of the fair ones of Wardan, described their charms in sarcastic verse, and stuck his scroll upon the door of the village mosque, taking at the same time the wise precaution to change his lodgings without delay.  The very mention of his name affronts the brave Wardanenses to the last extent, making them savage as Oxford bargees. [FN#3] The Barrage is a handsome bridge,-putting the style of architecture out of consideration,-the work of French engineers, originally projected by Napoleon the First.  It was intended to act as a dam, raising the waters of the Nile and conducting them to Suez, the salt lakes, and a variety of other places, through a number of canals, which, however, have not yet been opened.  Meanwhile, it acts upon the river’s trunk as did the sea of old upon its embouchures, blocking it up and converting the land around it to the condition of a swamp.  Moreover, it would have cleaned out the bed by means of sluice gates, forming an artificial increase of current to draw off the deposit; but the gates are wanting, so the piers, serving only to raise the soil by increasing the deposit of silt, collect and detain suspended matter, which otherwise would not settle.  Briefly, by a trifling expenditure the Barrage might be made a blessing to Egypt; in its present state it is a calamity, an “enormous, cruel wonder,” more crushing to the people than were the pyramids and sphinxes of old. [FN#4] Those