CAPTAIN YULE'S MISSION TO THE COURT OF AVA.. * TEE object

of this embassy to the present King of Burmah was to negotiate what is diplomatically called a treaty of amity and commerce, after hostility and war had -extorted a large shoe of the dominions which his deposed brother had possessed. The Mission was received with much greater respect than has hitherto been accorded to any foreign embassy; the King and his Minis- ters appeared personally friendly ; and comparative freedom of exploration was allowed to the members of the Mission, partly perhaps because the King himself has a tarn for philosophy. No treaty, however, was obtained ; either through a mistrust not un- like Mr. John dade's as to the danger attendant upon sealing, or a real prejudice of the Burmese to treaties, if they can help them- selves. The Mission steamed up the Irawadi from Rangoon to the capital Amarapoora ; and, after a residence of nearly two months, steamed back again re infeeth. It is of this voyage, of the residence at the capital including the Royal and Ministerial interviews, and of a few explorations in the vicinity, that the narrative proper consists. Various sub- jects are discussed in the volume, relating to the history, religion, arts, and manners of the Burmese, as well as to the geography of the country. These all contain the results of actual knowledge but the matter is mainly drawn from other works ; and, relating to remote, or as regards religion to often-discussed topics, it wants the interest or the freshness of living subjects.

Captain Yule has brought to his narrative and to his more dis- 9nisitional chapters a knowledge of many things, which after all is the main help to observation. In all that regards structure and execution, his profession as an engineer makes him an adept ; he as much information on the ate sciences, as wen as history and ": on of the Burmese. ll ti has a taste in architecture, art, and the •

This knowledge he applies to the existing buil' gs, as well as to the remains of ecclesiastical art, which were found in the course of the Mission's voyage along the banks of the Irawadi. His descrip- tions of these things, especially of the antiquities of Pagan, are not only curious in themselves, but for the speculations they open up as to origin of the Burmese style, and the splendour of the empire centuries ago, confirmatory of the reports by medneval travellers who occasionally wandered beyond the Ganges. After all, however, it is living man and his actual productions in which interest mainly centres ; and there is a good deal of such in the volume, though not so much as may be found in some books of travels. Like all people who have few sources of amuse- * A Narrative of the Mission sent by the Governor-General to the Court gA". in 1855: with Notices of the Country, Government, and People. By Captain sea* Yule, Bengal Engineers, F.R.G.S.; late Secretary to the Envoy, nume-

rous Illustrations. Published by Smith and Elder. &c. With

meat in themselves, probably few topics of conversation, and cer- tainly no newspapers or popular literature, the Burmese are much addicted to dramatic entertainments, and very patient over their slow and elongated development. The Mission frequently landed for ceremonial purposes, and were mostly treated to a play. This is the critical deduction.

"Kings, princes, princesses, and their ministers and courtiers, are the usual dramatic characters. As to the plot, we usually found it very difficult to obtain the slightest idea of it. A young prince was almost always there as the hero; he as constantly, had a clownish servant, a sort of 8hak- sperisn Lance, half-fool half-wit, who did the comic business' with im- mense success among the Native audience, as their rattling and unanimous peals of laughter proved. It was in this character only that anything to be called acting was to be seen ; and that was often highly humorous, and ap- preciable even without understanding the dialogue. Then there was always a princess whom the prince was in love with. The interminable prolixity of dialogue was beyond all conception and endurance. What came of it all, we could not tell. I doubt if any one could; for, with the usual rate at which the action advances, it must have taken several weeks to arrive at a denouement.

" Much of the dialogue was always in singing ; and in those parts, the attitudes, action, and sustained wailmgs, had a savour of the Italian, which was intensely comical at first. Dancing by both the male and female characters was often interspersed, or combined with the action. The female characters in towns more remote from the capital were often personated by boys, but so naturally that we were indisposed at first to credit it."

The decency or indecency of the Burmese drama is a disputed point. Major Phayre, the Envoy, a capital Burmese scholar, de- cides in favour of correctness ; ascribing anything beyond that to a polite wish of the Burmese to hit the taste of their visitors. Professor Oldham, the geologist, had travelled through one of the provinces, and seen a good many plays in various parts ; and his evidence in support of the opposite conclusion is strong. However, hear both sides, and Major Phayre first.

" I have now seen a good many Burmese plays., and I declare, as a man of honour, that I never saw anything approaching to indecency, except when there was a sprinkling of Europeans. And I'have not the slightest doubt but that the indecent actions I allude to were supposed to be conform- able to the tastes of their civilized visitors. I have been at numbers of these entertainments where I was the only European, and then never saw any- thing of the kind. I have witnessed broad and coarse scenes certainly, and heard indelicate allusions ; but most certainly not worse than I have seen in booths at English fairs, roared at by a rade audience. In one of the plays we were present at, something rather broad was exhibited, out of compliment to our tastes ; and what was the remark of the Woondouk [the conductor of the Mission] to me?—' You will not see anything of the kind at the capital. Here it passes among rude people. How could one sit at a play with one's wife and daughter were anything improper exhibited ? '

" What I object to is Oldham's remark being supposed a true one with re- ference to Burmese taste and practice. As you say, it seemed to be to the taste of the audience.' Take indiscriminately any company of English folks, put them in a theatre, and let such a scene as we witnessed be exhi- bited. There would be a loud shout at once.'

" Now for the other side. Mr. Oldham, having seen the question mooted elsewhere, sent me another note, in which he clearly established, from what he himself witnessed in a performance at Maulmam by a party of actors from Rangoon, the fact that things for which indecency would be far too mild a name were there exhibited, not as extemporized interludes, but as part and parcel of the substantive plot of the play ; and that they were so was confirmed by his having the opportunity of examining with a compe- tent interpreter the text of two of the pieces, in which the whole was laid down with stage-directions of the grossest character, and with graphic illus- trations of the most filthy kind, needing no interpreter. In this case, I think Major Phayre cannot build much on the circumstance that the repre- sentation took place in a British dependency. These things are brought forward as facts, not as subjects for futile comparisons. We are in no posi- tion to throw stones in this matter, and need not go back to Wycherley and Mrs. Behn for stage immoralities. The true reconciliation of the contro- versy no doubt lies in the fact that there is a high and a low in the Bur- mese drama. It does not follow from Mr. Oldham's evidence that his Ma- jesty the 'Great King of Justice,' with his courtiers, would tolerate the ri- baldry which delights Maulinain."

One of the places of commercial production visited b' Cap- tain Yule was the petroleum wells, whence large supplies are drawn. It seems a natural monopoly altogether, requiring little beyond the labour of digging and transport ; and is practically admitted by the Natives to be a privileged article pertaining to certain families. The cost in this country is not much influenced by the monopoly. On the river bank it is about 35s. per ton ; in the London market, from 40/, to 451. for the same quantity. The scarcity of rags some time ago turned public attention to a variety of fibrous vegetable substitutes; our traveller found the bamboo in use; but the result was not promising, possibly from want of drill or care.

" Fapermaking is here a very rude process. The frame is stretched with the common close-woven cotton cloth of the country,. bordered with wooden ledges to confine the pulp. This is placed in a shallow trough ; the pulp being then poured in, spread over the frame, and rolled with a bamboo. It is then lifted slowly and drained ; but the sheet cannot be removed at once, as it is even in the rude Bengalee process. The frame is set for some time to dry in the sun before this is attempted. The material is the fibre of green bamboos. This is macerated in small tanks for some weeks, and then pounded into a coarse pulp. The bamboos which we saw in maceration ap- peared to hate been about an inch and a quarter in diameter, and were split into shavings about one-eighth of an inch in thickness. The resulting paper is soft, but tough, fibrous, and of unequal thickness, only fit for paclang purposes. I am not sure that this is the same paper which, agglutinated into a sort of pasteboard and covered with a charcoal paste, is doubled into note-books under the name parabeiks, and written on with a steatite pencil. In this form it resembles our school-slates rather than writing- paper, the writing being easily obliterated. Yet this was almost the only form ITI which district records appeared to have been kept in Pegu, when the pro- vince fell into our hands. Writing-paper, properly so called, is not made at all in Burmah. Books are written with a style on palm-leaves, as in Cey- lon ; and for the few letters that are written in ink, English or Chinese paper is made use of."

The religion of the Burmese is well known to be a form of Buddhism, with its monasteries, its religious orders and cere- monies closely approaching the iopish, its speculative trinity, its theoretical atheism or pantheism, and in the minds of many a practical belief in some superintending power. The philosophy of the Buddhists is of an equally curious character, not unlike that of the ancients and the mediaeval speculators, who in the outset perhaps derived it from the East. Yet, as Captain Yule observes, a dim glimpse of truths developed by modern discovery is occasionally to be found; though it is a doubt whether they are mere coincidences arising from rhetorical guess or from some partial perception, such as is found among individuals in moral or economical science. The King himself is a learned man, and at a private conference he entered into learned questions with the Envoy.

" We had waited probably twenty minutes when the expected music sounded from within, and the guardsmen, (accompanied by Mr. Camaretta in his usual white jacket,) entered and dropped on their knees on either side. The doors in front of us were at the same time thrown open, and disclosed a long suite of gilded apartments, with the King, a rather short man, but muscular and well-proportioned, slowly pacing towards us, in rear of the attendants, who bore the sword and other royal apparatus just described.

" Coming in with a bright sparkling look, he took off his sandals behind the sofa, seemed to wipe his feet on a velvet hassock, and took his seat, doubling up his legs in the Burman fashion.

"Our nearer view made no unfavourable change in our judgment of the King's appearance. He has a clear and smooth skin, with a bright black eye, which twinkles up into quite a Chinese obliquity when he laughs, and that he does every two minutes ; his moustache is good, the throat and jaws very massive, the chest and arms remarkably well developed, and the hands clean and small. The retreating forehead, which marks him as a descend- ant of Alompra, was now very conspicuous ; and I never saw this feature before in such singular excess.

" He was dressed in the ordinary Burman fashion ; with a scanty muslin fillet round his head, a well-fitting white cotton jacket, and a gay Immo of zigzag stripes. The only royal magnificence about his person was displayed in the tsalwd which crossed his chest in three distinct pairs of bands, breeched at the nine intersections with splendidly-jewelled fibula) in form of crescents or rosettes. He also wore a pair of ear-tubes, in in the centre of each of which sparkled a right royal ruby. After looking round awhile with a pod-humoured expression, he began to talk ; first addressing him- self to the Atwen-woons.

" K. Are the books which I ordered ready ? ' "At. They are ready, your Majesty, and collected in the outer apart- ment.'

" K. (Addressing the Envoy.) Among these books is the Maha-Radza- Wang. Read it carefully, and let it enter into your heart. The advantage will be twofold. First, you will learn the events which have passed, and the kings who have succeeded each other ; and secondly, as regards futurity, you will gather from thence the instability of human affairs, and the use- lessness of strife and anger.'

"E. I will carefully study the work.'

"K. As regards the other works also, by constant study they can be ac- quired. As I said on a former occasion, the mass of earth, water, and air, which compose the great island (the earth) and Mount Myennio, is vast, but learning is more stupendous still, and great labour is necessary to acquire it. Do you know how many elements there are in a man's body ?'

"E. ' I cannot inform your Majesty.'

" K. The body consists of a vast number of particles, small as flour or dust. One hair of the head appears Ince a single fibre, does it not ?'

"E. It does, your Majesty.' "K. Well it is made up of a great number of smaller fibres, just as one of your long ropes you sound the depth of water with is composed of short fibres. Of the elements, earth enters into the bones, and water into the hair.' "

The Narrative, originally printed at Calcutta for the use of the Government, is now published, in consequence of the favourable reception it met with. This edition has been subject to re- arrangement and revision ; the assistance of the Envoy himself and members of the Mission being freely given. The quarto form of the volume, the splendid style of getting-up, and the num- ber and excellence of the cuts and plates, would suggest that it may now appear under official patronage,—possibly the last of the many works whose publication has been owing to the li- berality of the East India Company.