Few more important volumes than this communication on the subject of Tibet, have appeared in modern times, and our Sexagenarian has not failed to express himself with particular self-complacency from the circumstance of having rendered some service in its publication.
It is not on every occasion that due sagacity and wisdom is exercised in selecting agents for remote political missions, but as in the former instance of the Ambassador to Ava, so in this of the deputation to Bootan and Tibet, the East India Company could not possibly have decided with greater propriety, or with sounder wisdom.
The people of Ava were a lofty, ostentatious, and courtly race. The Ambassador to that region had a proper sense of his own dignity, and of that of the nation of which he was the representative, and at the same time entered into all the splendid gaieties of a gaudy court, without rendering any violence to his natural disposition.
The Tibetians were grave, formal, and reserved; marked by the strongest peculiarities of manners, and of prejudices. The agent sent among them, was grave, serious, sensible, properly tenacious of his personal importance, without offending peculiarities, the extreme simplicity and eccentricity of which, cannot, under a less sanction than that of the Ambassador’s assertion of what he witnessed, easily obtain credit. What to a European, and more particularly to an Englishman can be more preposterous, than the Polyandry of Tibet, and to see “one female associating her fate and fortune with all the brothers of a family, without any restriction of age or of numbers.” Marriage, it is observed by our Traveller, is in Tibet, considered as an odium, an heavy burden, the weight and obloquy of which, a whole family are disposed to lessen, by sharing it among them. Indeed the number of husbands to one female, is not defined nor restricted within any limits. Mr T. mentions one family in which five brothers were living very happily together with one female, under the same connubial compact.
The termination of this valuable traveller’s life was extremely melancholy. His health had long been impaired by climate, as well as by his fatiguing exertions in the discharge of his functions. In his progress one day from his apartments in the West end of the town to the city, he was attacked in Fleet-street with an epileptic fit, and as no papers were found on his person, to designate precisely who he was, he was carried to the poor-house to be owned. It is more than probable, that under these circumstances, he did not receive all the attention, which his real rank in life claimed, and his immediate situation demanded; but in this place he was not recognized till he was actually dead. His publication will, however, always rank exceedingly high in the class to which it belongs, and the memory of his accomplishments, and of his amiable and conciliatory manners, can cease only with the lives of those who enjoyed the advantages of his friendship.
Et tamen hunc audes maculare et dicere nigrum
Desine; habet certe numen et iste suum.
CHAPTER XIV.
The last traveller to distant regions, of whom there are notices in our Sexagenarian’s Recollections, was a noble Lord, the history of whose life involves many extraordinary particulars. The gay, the witty, but depraved Lord ⸺, was his uncle, and he has often been heard to detail the very mysterious circumstances of the death of his relation, with much solemnity and pathos. He was at that time at school, his morals therefore were not contaminated by his connection with that nobleman, though it cannot be denied that he afterwards launched into the gaieties of youth, and the dissipation of the times, with an ardour to which, unfortunately, his rank and situation afforded too many and too great facilities.