Page:Narrative of a journey through the upper provinces of India etc. (Volume III.).djvu/393

Rh to remove, which makes a parent regard it as unpropitious to allow his son to remain unmarried, and which couples together children of twelve or fourteen years of age. The second has its origin in the long-continued misfortunes and intestine wars of India, which are as yet too recent (even when their causes have ceased to exist) for the agitation which they occasioned to have entirely sunk into a calm. But to say that the Hindoos or Mussulmans are deficient in any essential feature of a civilised people, is an assertion which I can scarcely suppose to be made by any who have lived with them. Their manners are, at least, as pleasing and courteous as those in the corresponding stations of life among ourselves; their houses are larger, and, according to their wants and climate, to the full as convenient as ours; their architecture is at least as elegant, and though the worthy Scotch divines may doubtless wish their labourers to be clad in “hodden grey” and their gentry and merchants to wear powder and mottled stockings, like worthy Mr. ——————— and the other elders of his kirk-session, I really do not think that they would gain either in cleanliness, elegance, or comfort, by exchanging a white cotton robe for the completest suits of dittos. Nor is it true that in the mechanic arts they are inferior to the general run of European nations. Where they fall short of us (which is chiefly in agricultural implements and the mechanics of common life,) they are not, so far as I have understood of Italy and the south of France, surpassed in any great degree by the people of those countries.