SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGE. 
57 
ral decadency. National education, which was once 
their glory and their boast, when every village had 
its schoolmaster, and a female philosopher, whose 
writings are even now prized as oracles of moral wis- 
dom, furnished text-books to the college of Madura, 
has lapsed into a state of melancholy desuetude, and 
the poorer orders of Hindoos are in a condition of 
deplorable ignorance ; so that those crimes consequent 
upon the absence of knowledge, prevail among them 
to a melancholy extent. Nevertheless, though 
,f Fallen from their high estate , ” 
there still exist great and glorious remains of the 
splendours of by-gone generations — immortal monu- 
ments at once of their cultivated and mighty capaci- 
ties in the pursuit of wisdom. And even now may 
be frequently found among them those who have 
trodden the perplexed labyrinths of speculative philo- 
sophy, and the scarcely less intricate paths of inductive 
science, with untired feet and a steady aim, coming 
out of the elaborate pursuit with minds well stored 
and hearts spiritualized by the search. 
The Hindoos are, as a people, devotedly attached to 
their national institutions, which are consecrated by 
the sanctions of high antiquity, and endeared by 
those prejudices which time and ignorance never fail 
to cherish ; and ignorance has now, for several gene- 
rations, been sadly superinduced to the miseries of 
subjugation. They have, as I have already said, the 
highest opinion of their national music, and I cannot 
better show the fervency of their faith in this par- 
ticular than by an extract from the third volume of 
