CHAPTER VI
SOCIAL LIFE
SCATTERED up and down the pages of books of travel, and in the early numbers of the Calcutta Review, that delightful mine of information on Indian subjects both grave and gay, may be found pictures of English society in Calcutta from the earliest years of the settlement,—pictures which are curiously alike in their general outlines much as the details may vary, for all emphasize as characteristic the display of wealth, the craving for amusement, the enjoyment of the pleasures of the table, side by side with the courageous endurance of physical ills, the calm facing of Death in his most terrible aspects, the quiet prosecution of good works, from the "pious charity" which reared the first English Church of St Anne and founded the
107
