14 BENGALI LITERATURE Hastings! declared as early as 1762 that “ the country people are habituated to entertain the most unfavourable notion of our government” and Verelst ? asked in 1772 “ How could we make the sordid interests of the trader consistent with that unbiased integrity which must reconcile the natives to a new dominion?” Nothing would be a more apt and incising description of the miserable state of the country than the celebrated simile of the author of the Sec Mutagherin® in which he compares it to the predicament of an untenanted house infested by robbers but having no master to protect it. The Anglo-Indian society, itself degraded, made light of such unrighteous proceedings : and tae private morals of the Company’s servants were no better Th rivate morals - : : ee 01778 ser. than their public conduct. Hastings vants no better than nd Sir Philip Franeis lived in open their public conduct. and 1 রে 1) adultery ; and extravagant rumours were afloat with respect to the latter’s card-winnings. The morals of the majority of the Company’s servants are truthfully, if grossly, portrayed in the weekly Hicky’s Gazette *, published a hundred years ago; and it is well- known that this notorious paper, itself conducted by one of “the most objectionable rowdy that ever landed in Caleutta,” was ruined by incurring Hastings’ displeasure for making public the strictly private arrangement by which the wife of the German adverturer and portrait-painter had become the wife of the great Governor-General. Sunday was not only given np to horse-racing, card-gambling, and
‘ Hasting’s Letter, dated Ap. 25, 1762 quoted in R. ©. Dutt, op. cit., p. 22. 2 Verelst, op. cit., p. 62. ® Seir Mutagherin, iii. 185,
- Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta, 1888, gives many specimens;
see p. 171 et. seq. (ch. vii.) ; see also pp.109- 170 on the social life of the Anglo-Indians.
