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VIII. Secret Correspo7idence of the Court of the Peshwa, Madhu Rao, from 

 the Year I76I to 1772. Translated from the Original Mahratta Letters, 

 by Lieut. -Colonel John Briggs, M.R.A.S. 



Read May 3, 1828. 



On the last occasion on which we met, I was permitted by your indulgence 

 to read a piece of autobiography of Nana Farnevis, one of the most eminent 

 persons who have become familiarly known to us since our first connexion 

 with India. I stated that a vast number of the private and confidential 

 papers of that extraordinary personage had fallen into my hands previously 

 to my quitting India ; and that a small, but interesting portion of them, had 

 been translated by me and brought to this country. These translations have 

 been submitted to two or three of the most distinguished members of our 

 Society ; and they have been pleased to express a wish that some of them 

 might bebr ought to the notice of the Society, and explained by a narrative 

 of °the circumstances that led to their being written. The letters commence 

 with the public life of Nana Farnevis in 176I, and end with the fall of his 

 power as minister to the Peshwa in 1796. They form valuable materials to 

 elucidate his conduct during his long and arduous official career ; but they 

 are the more remarkable for the insight they afford us into the secret springs 

 which seem to have regulated the behaviour of his illustrious master and 

 sovereign Madhu Rao the Great, who, as I have before mentioned,* asended 

 the throne in his sixteenth, and died in his twenty-eighth year. The period 

 of his reign was that which formed the character of Nana Farnevis, and the 

 intercourse of these young persons is developed in a very interesting 

 manner in the letters alluded to. The correspondence belongs as much to 

 the biography of Nana as to that of Madhu Rao ; and as I have it in con- 

 templation at some future period, if my time permits, to write the life 

 of Nana, I am perhaps detracting from the value of that work by the 

 present essay. My desire to contribute to the interest of our meetings, and to 

 the utility of our Society, has however induced me to comply wit h the wishes 



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