Page:A history of the military transactions of the British nation in Indostan, Volume 1.djvu/14

6 This is so slight as to give him no chance of opposing with success the onset of an inhabitant of more northern regions.

HIS manners are gentle; his happiness consists in the solaces of a domestic life; to which sufficiently inclined by the climate, he is obliged by his religion, which esteems matrimony a duty indispensible in every man who does not quit the world to unite himself to God: such is their phrase. Although permitted by his religion, according to the example of his gods, to have several, he is seldom the husband of more than one wife: and this wife is of a decency of demeanour, of a sollicitude in her family, and of a fidelity to her vows, which might do honour to human nature in the most civilized countries.

HIS amusements consist in going to his Pagoda, in assisting at religious shews, in fulfilling a variety of ceremonies prescribed to him on all occasions, by the Bramin; for, subject to a thousand lapses from the ideas he has adopted of impurity, the Indian is always offending his gods, who are not to be appeased untill their priest is satisfied.

IN a country of such great extent, divided into so many distinct sovereignties, it cannot be expected that there should be no exceptions to one general assertion of the character of the inhabitants. There is every where in the mountains a wild inhabitant, whose bow an European can scarcely draw. There are in the woods people who subsist by their incursions into the neighbouring plains, and who, without the ferocity of the American, possess all his treachery; and according to Mr. Thevenot, India has had its cannibals in the centre of one of the most cultivated provinces of the empire. The Rajpouts by their courage have preserved themselves almost independant of the Great Mogul. The inhabitants of the countries still nearer to the mountains of the frontier, distinguished by the activity of then character from the indolence of the rest of the nation, have easily turned Mahomedans; these northern converts we suppose to be the origin of the present Affghans and Pitans, who are the best troops