Jeffreys would, probably, have rejoiced over both smoke and sciatica, had he known of them; for Baxter was the marked object of his brutality. The number of published works especially stirred up the rage of the judge. This being somewhat intolerable, Jeffreys launched at the author the judicial summaries of "fanatical dog" and "old knave." The "old" alone was true, Baxter being then in his seventieth year. Baxter has always been ranked among the great preachers of the seventeenth century. He wants, indeed, the rich imagery of Jeremy Taylor, the bold energy of South, and the exhaustive logic of Barrow, but there was that union of intellect with feeling, without which no speaker can long rule an audience. His great pulpit victories were doubtless won in the pulpit of St. Mary's, Kidderminster, where he was appointed lecturer; but wherever Baxter spoke, words of power fell upon the ear. Whether preaching to the House of Commons in St. Margaret's, to the Corporation of London in St. Paul's, or to crowded congregations at the Tuesday lectures in Joiners' Hall and Fetter Lane, he excited thought and stirred up emotion-men did not leave with the remark, "There was nothing in it.” The exact site of Baxter's grave is unknown. "Buried in the chancel" is the answer to every inquiry; but no short epitaph, no memorial words tell under which of those time-worn and unlettered stones lies the body of Baxter. The church registers inform us that he was buried on the 17th of December, 1691, and that is all which Christ Church can tell the world about Richard Baxter. A summary of Baxter's life is soon told. He however, so often recommended a single life to preachers, that some of the gentlemen who had acted upon his advice naturally pointed to his practical comment upon his own precepts. Doubtless Baxter was a wise man; he certainly gained, by his own confession, nineteen years of "love and mutual complacency." The great revolution came, and the Toleration Act nearly terminated legalized persecution; but a great change was also then approaching Baxter-the end of life was at hand. He understood the significant signs of the coming event. His will was made in July, 1689; every sermon became more suggestive of the approaching hour; and on the 8th of December, 1691, he passed into the state of which he had so earnestly written, and entered into "the saint's everlasting rest." The fame of his writings, labors, and sufferings drew a vast concourse to his funeral, the line of carriages extending from Christ Church far down Cheapside. The royal, the noble, and the knightly dead lie forgotten in the ancient burial-ground of the Gray Friars; but the greatest of those who sleep in the modern Christ Church is Richard Baxter. We may no longer fully sympathize with his style; we may have learned to accept conclusions from which he would have shrunk; but the freest minds, the strongest understandings, the widest hearts, and the most earnest Christians of the present time, will see in this old divine many points of attraction for one of repulsion. THE WOMEN OF INDIA. CONCLUDING PAPER. was born at Rowton, near High Encal, Shrop- POLYGAMY throws its terrors, either as a possibility or a fact, over the heart of every married lady in India. Creation and divine law have ordained woman's heart to be queen of her husband's heart, and to reign without a rival. But heathenism has dared to overthrow that right, and sternly tells the loving and trusting wife that she must, and without complaining, admit a partner in her husband's affection if he desires it. How often are long years of duty and fidelity thus rewarded, and the true, faithful heart is crushed for life, as she sees herself superseded by some youthful stranger, who has stolen her lord's heart and attention, and leaves her to pine in neglect and sorrow! shire, 1615; received ordination at Worcester, in 1638, from Bishop Thornborough, and, in 1640, was chosen lecturer at Kidderminster. Being driven away by political tumults in 1642, he returned in 1646, and continued there during all the changes of the next fourteen years. Baxter rejoiced in the restoration of the king, but the Act of Uniformity found him unable to comply with its requirements, and then came not only banishment from his beloved Kidderminster, but a long series of insults, ending in a trial before Jeffreys, and an imprisonment for two years. Just as these days were coming he found a young lady willing to share with him all the opposition of enemies by becoming his It little avails for this contradictory legislation wife. There was nothing very astounding in to say, "In whatever family the husband is conthoughtful and enthusiastic Miss Charlton being tented with his wife, and the wife with her husmarried, in her twenty-fourth year, to the famous band, in that house will fortune be assuredly Richard Baxter in his forty-seventh. He had, ¦ permanent ;" "Let him be constantly satisfied with her alone"-or that, "Neither by sale nor by desertion can a wife be released from her husband"— when the legislator straightway proceeds to open this terrible door to man's caprice, and leaves him to be the sole judge of when and how soon, or often, he will enter it. He ordains that a woman must meekly endure all the wrongs and slights heaped upon her forbearing heart, without leaving her one avenue of escape or retaliation, and deliberately hands over to the husband every resource of power over her, so that she is utterly defenseless against even the cruel revenge that may at any time choose to crush her. The right to become a polygamist, should he prefer it for any reason, must unsettle any man's heart, and be a barrier to true and permanent affection, while it renders him weak in the development of that real love which sorrows and mutual trials ripen into the realization of that priceless union of heart, and hope, and destiny, which sings amid its maturity: "We have lived and loved together That right to be thus unsympathetic and fickle, and to inflict this terrible wrong upon her whom he ought to cherish and cleave to, "forsaking all others as long as they both should live," Menu fully grants in the following ordinances of his code: "If after one damsel has been shown, another be offered to the bridegroom, who had purchased leave to marry her from her next kinsman, he may become the husband of both for the same price;" | "Even though a man have married a young woman in legal form, yet he may abandon her, if he find her blemished, afflicted with disease, or ... and given to him with fraud. If any man give a faulty damsel in marriage, without disclosing her blemish, the husband may annul that act of her ill-minded giver;" "A wife who drinks any spirituous liquors, who acts immorally, who shows hatred to her lord, who is incurably diseased, who is mischievous, who wastes his property, may at all times be superseded by another wife. A barren wife may be superseded by another in the eighth year; she whose children are all dead, in the tenth; she who brings forth only daughters, in the eleventh; she who speaks unkindly, without delay; but she who, though afflicted with illness, is beloved and virtuous, must never be disgraced, though she may be superseded by another wife with her own consent." (Sec. 204. C. 8.) select a cause of dissatisfaction, in any hour of alienation or dislike; no tribunal or process is required; the husband is sole judge and executor of this facile law, and in a single day the virtuous and faithful lady may find herself a discarded outcast without pity or redress on earth. If she escape all such causes of divorce, and keeps possession of her home and husband, there still remains the liability of polygamy. He may at any hour wander from his place-a new face may strike his fancy, or a desire for more sons, or some other pretext, may urge him to add to the occupants of his zenana; and the terrible fact may be only known to her by the arrival of the one who leaves her to weep alone. I have been often asked to what extent polygamy prevails in India. For reasons already manifest it is not easy to give a sufficient answer to this inquiry. I fear it is more general than is supposed. Of course the crime is limited by its expense. It is a luxury that poor men can not well afford, yet even they are not innocent of successional polygamy; they often forsake or change their wives, and then take others. Among the rich it is very common. Indeed, with that class it is viewed rather as an exhibition of wealth and splendor, and cases are not rare where ten or a dozen ladies may be found in the zenana of a Rajah or Nawab. There are varieties in the law and usage of the different religionists of India in this regard, but all of them allow the practice. The Parsee faith and usage limits polygamy to a second wife, and then only where the first is childless, and gives her consent to the introduction of the second. The Mohammedan is allowed by his Koran to take up to four wives or concubines, and few of the wealthy among them limit themselves to less than this number; while it is notorious that they use their facilities of divorce with so little scruple that their license under their law is practically unlimited. The opulent Hindoos are restricted somewhat in the increase of their wives by the absurd expensiveness of their marriage ceremonies, but are limited in no other way as to the number they choose to take. The unbounded polygamy of the Kulin Brahmins has been described in a former article. The law lays down the subordination which is to exist in a home where there are several wives. The first married remains mistress of the family. The others are designated sapatnis, or auxiliary wives, and she is expected and required to treat them as she would younger sisters. Every additional wife added is thus Here is wide range enough from which to instructed by the Hindoo authority called Sacon English Government. It is bad enough to be one among many wives, but to be the wife of many husbands must be a wonderful relation for any woman to sustain. India's greatest poem is the Mahabharata, and its lovely heroine, Draupady, is represented, at the great tournament, as throwing the garland of preference over the neck of the valjant Ajuna, whom she loves so well. But with him she accepts his four elder brothers, and is henceforth regarded by all five as their common consort. Singular enough there is not a word of reprehension for the relation, and the story ends with the reception of the entire family to the home of the gods. Sir Wm. Jones, our great Orientalist, facetiously designates this family of the Pandian chiefs and their common consort as "the five-maled, single-female flower," and there is reason to believe that this curiosity bloomed then in other localities of the land besides Indrapresta. The code must certainly have tended to its abolition, for except in the Ceylon Mountains, among the Nairs of the South, and very limitedly in the Himalaya Mountains, the daughters of India have ceased to lament the dwaper yug-a departed age when they sang : "Prepost'rous! that one biped vain Should drag ten housewives In his train, Whatever may have been the motive for this unnatural alliance in the ancient days the purpose in our own, as I learned in the Himalayas, is the gain to be realized by the sale of their fairer daughters to supply the zenanas of the plains, and the dearth of women thus occasioned led to the continuance of this unnatural custom; and so one vice created another, and that, too, its very opposite. The English Government has done what it could to repress the practice of polyandry where it still exists. A widow in India is undoubtedly the most miserable of her sex anywhere. The life of women in the marriage relation in that land, even at its best, must be an object of commiseration to those who are blessed with a higher civilization, but what woman becomes when she sinks into the fearful condition of Hindoo widowhood can not be fully described. She is now more than ever under the tyranny of her cruel law, and the bitterest dregs of a woman's misery are then and henceforth wrung out to her. Her youth, her beauty, her wealth give her no exemption whatever; the rules, relentless as death, enforce their dreadful claims upon her and VOL XXX.-24 crush her down. She may even never have lived with her husband, never seen his home, never received a single kiss or salutation from him, but be simply a betrothed wife, not a dozen years old, it may be-she too, though a mere child that never left the paternal roof, must sink to the fearful level. For this accursed law dooms the virgin widow to the same fate as the lady that may have lived with a husband for forty years. Formerly they were expected to become Suttees and burn with the man's body. British humanity, thank heaven, has ended that hellish custom. So they live, but how much better than death is their condition let my readers judge when they learn the facts in her case. In the first of these papers I introduced a Hindoo wife as she appears in her best estate, a married wife in her full dress and jewelry. From a photograph which has been engraved with equal fidelity, I now present a picture of a Hindoo widow as she appears in her weeds, sitting upon the ground in her sorrow. Her aspect and her attire show, even to a stranger, at first sight, the agony of her condition, which will be better understood when the rules of her now hopeless existence are stated. In the forms of their exclamations, when they first realize that they are widowed, there are terribly reflective phrases which imply that, for aught they know, they may be responsible for their husband's death; that not misery alone, but guilt also may fasten upon their wretched hearts. This arises from their fear that in the responsibilities of their caste duties, in preparing food, etc., they may have, even unwittingly, violated some rule of the Shaster, and that the gods have visited the violation with their vengeance in the sickness and death of the husband. The terrific fear thus seizes on the lacerated heart that they may be guilty of the death which they mourn! Her own children and friends she justly fears are entertaining similar thoughts concerning her, and this dreadful weight sinks her to despair. If there were any mitigations in her condition henceforth to which she could turn for relief, her sense of innocent intention might help her now. But the tender sympathy and divine compassion which Christianity inculcates for the widow in her sorrow-the assurance that such afflicted hearts are taken under the peculiar protection of the God of the Bible, who says to the dying parent, "Leave thy fatherless children to me and I will preserve them alive, and let thy widows trust in me"the blessed book that so tenderly instructs those who yield themselves to its guidance that "true religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and the widow in their affliction "-that book, that faith, that compassion is peculiar to Christianity, and has no counterpart whatever in the heartless and cruel code of Hindooism. So woman, in the sad condition where the divinest sympathies of our faith surround and sustain her, is deserted and insulted by the heathenism which loads on her wretched heart a weight of woe which, in its atrocity, as the fruit of its peculiar civilization and the outgrowth of its thirty centuries of oppression, has come at last to consider the sorrowing one as though the words widow and accursed were synony | their hair in unshortened locks, the ministers of fiery-eyed Yaman shall bind with cords the husband of her desire." In a former article I stated that I had never seen the face of a respectable woman in India during my nearly ten years of residence there; the subject under remark reminds me that there is one qualification of this statement. I did see ladies on the occasion of the " Maha-Mela," which occurred while I was in India. The mela, so called, occurs but once in twelve years, and at it, as a peculiar right and in view of the religious austerities and duties to be performed, the ladies are released from the obligation of seclusion and go about in the mela unveiled. I have stood by and seen a row of barbers on the brink of the Ganges engaged in ruthlessly cutting the beautiful tresses from the heads of these ladies. They crouched down under the fearful operation, and their rich raven locks were swept off and flung aside in heaps on the shore, when the timid creatures would put on a ing like so many convalescents from a fever hospital, with an aspect that told that they felt disgraced, they trod their way down into the river, and, performing the required immersion, returned to their camp with the poor consolation taught them by their priests, that sins as numerous as the hairs they had sacrificed were washed away by that ablution. My heart never ached more for my fellow-creatures-save on an occasion at the burning ghat—than it did that day as I saw this satanic religion thus openly insulting and humiliating the women of India. The day she becomes a widow the lady in India sinks to a lot little less terrible than death itself. All her ornaments and beautiful cloth-small white cap on the shaven head, and, looking-on which her poor, uninstructed mind has doted-are taken from her, so that "jewelless woman is the well-understood designation for a widow. She is henceforth to wear the duncolored robe in which the engraving represents her, on which there must be no seam, no fringe, no figure. Her Thali-the equivalent of the marriage ring in England-which her husband tied round her neck when he married her, is removed. From her forehead the bright vermilion mark is wiped away. Her raven locks are ruthlessly cut off. And how much they value them is illustrated by Robinson in the case even of a female convict in the Agra prison. This woman had defeated the magistrates and wardens for seven years. She said she never had worked and she never would work. Mr. Woodcock, the Inspector of Prisons, determined that he would bring her to terms, so he issued the order that her head should be shaved. She no sooner found that he was in earnest than her ferocity was conquered; she came into his presence and fell at his feet, and promised if he would only spare her hair she would work as much as he liked; and there she has been spinning ever since. What a hardened convict could not endure, the afflicted widow must submit to, without an exception. The terrible indignity is perpetual, for the head is henceforth shaven every ten days. The terrors of the "God of Hell" breaking forth against the departed husband are employed to make her endure the degradation, for, says the Casi-Candam, "If matrons who have put off glittering ornaments of gold still wreath But even this is not the end of the widow's misery. She must henceforth consider herself as a creature of evil destiny, practicing severe austerities; her weary limbs are no longer to repose upon a comfortable bed, her food is to be taken but once a day, and then only of the coarsest fare, and, lest her presence should involve the dreadful doom of a widow's condition, she is prohibited from ever appearing in the wedding ceremonies of another woman, no matter how nearly related to her. The higher in caste she is the more rigorously are these rules exacted; so that a Brahman's widow is the most wretched of all. And this is "according to law "—a doom laid on willfully and wickedly by their legislation and its commentators. Menu ordains as follows: "Let her emaciate her body, by living voluntarily on pure flowers' roots and fruit, but let her not, when her lord is deceased, ever pronounce the name of another man. Let her continue till death forgiving all injuries, performing harsh duties, |