536 
CALCUTTA. 
\ 
with the ideas of a Prince, not with those of a retail dealer in 
muslins and indigo. 
On a line with this edifice is a range of excellent houses, chu- 
named, and ornamented with verandahs. Chouringee, an entire vil- 
lage of palaces, runs for a considerable length at right angles with it, 
and, altogether, forms the finest view I ever beheld in any city. 
The Black Town is as complete a contrast to this as can well be con- 
ceived. Its streets are narrow and dirty ; the houses, of two stories, 
occasionally brick, but generally mud, and thatched, perfectly re- 
sembling the cabins of the poorest class in Ireland. 
Twenty years ago, during a famine, the population of Calcutta 
was estimated at 500,000. I have little doubt that it now amounts 
16 700,000. The most remarkable sight of the kind I ever beheld 
was the throng that fills the.se streets in an evening. I drovefor 
three miles through them without finding a single opening, except 
what was made by the servants preceding the carriage. The Strand 
in London exhibits nothing equal to it, for the middle is here as 
much crowded as the sides. In the year 174^, the Mahratta ditch 
was commenced, to protect the inhabitants from the incursions of 
that Power, then ravaging the whole of Bengal, and besieging Ali- 
verdi Khan in his capital of Moorshadabad. It was intended to 
surround the whole of our territories, a circumference at that time 
of not more than seven miles; yet now it scarcely forms the 
boundary of this capital of our Eastern possessions. The first fort was 
erected here in 1696. Our factories were then at Hoogly, but were 
moved two years afterwards. This little fort, which fell through 
the cowardice of its governor, and the want of military knowledge 
in the remaining officers, into the hands of Seraja-ud-Dowlah, in 
