BENARES. 
99 
mg too greatly upon the horrible throughout this des- 
cription, I beg to apologize and to offer my explanation 
in the following words of the great Burke. “ There 
is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue as that of some 
uncommon and grievous calamity ; so that whether 
the misfortune is before our eyes, or whether we are 
turned back to it in history, it always touches with 
delight. This is not an unmixed delight, hut blended 
with no small uneasiness. The delight we have in 
such things hinders us from shunning scenes of misery ; 
and the pain we feel prompts us to relieve ourselves 
in relieving those who suffer.” 
I might have detailed to the tender-hearted reader 
various cruel and wanton methods of infanticide 
practised in other parts of India. For instance, it 
has been ascertained that in some districts, the in- 
human parents have buried their living children up 
to the throat in the earth, leaving the head exposed 
to the attacks of the wild beasts and birds of prey ; 
others have been known to bind the poor innocents 
by the feet to the branch of a tree, there abandoning 
them to the most horrible of deaths ; in some places 
it has been the practice to hurl them headlong from 
a height into the waters of a river sacred to one or 
other of their unholy gods. But these most unnatural 
atrocities, it is to be hoped, have only been perpe- 
trated, when the treacherous dealings of the priesthood 
have so powerfully wrought upon the superstitious 
fears of the natives as altogether to overwhelm the 
k 2 
