The Candiam, 
259 
drews, however, under our government have begun to relax 
a little in the strictness of their ideas of blood ; and connexions 
are sometimes formed among them with inferiors without being 
attended by lasting infamy. 
The next rank to the nobles includes artists, such as paint- 
ers, and wliat is accounted the better sort of artificers, such as 
smiths, carpenters, and goldsmiths. The dress of this cast is 
nearly the same with that of the Hondrews ; but they are 
not permitted to eat with the nobles, or at all to mix in 
their society. 
Those who are employed in what are esteemed the lower oc- 
cupations of barbers, potters, washers, weavers, &c. form a 
third cast, with which the common soldiers rank. 
The fourth cast includes the peasantry, and labourers of all 
descriptions, who either cultivate the lands for themselves, or 
are hired out to work for others. The preference given to ar- 
tificers above both the husbandmen and the soldiers, is a very 
uncommon fact in the arrangement of the casts, and peculiar 
to Ceylon. The circumstance bespeaks a degree of civilization, 
and a love for the arts, which certainly do not correspond 
with the present state of these islanders, although by no means 
inconsistant with the architectural remains of better days, which 
in some parts have escaped the ravages of time and the foe. 
All these four casts, according to the Indian customs, con- 
tinue unmingled: the son pursues the profession of his father 
from generation to generation, and love as well as ambition is 
confined to the cast in which a man happens to be born. But 
besides these casts there is here, as in other parts of India, a 
wretched race of outcasts, the martyrs from age to age of this 
barbarous and unnatural institution. Those who by any crime or 
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