TRUBNER & CO?’S8 
MONTHLY LIST: 
Vol. IV., No. 8. 
we 
August, 1880, 
NOW READY, 
Post 8vo, pp. 496, cloth, price 18s, 
LINGUISTIC AND ORIENTAL ESSAYS. 
WRITTEN FROM THE YEAR 1846 To 1878, 
By ROBERT NEEDHAM CUST, 
Late Member of her Majesty’s Indian Civil Service ; Hon. Secretary to the Royal Asiatic Society ; 
and Author of “‘ The Modern Languages of the East Indies,” 
‘To me they represent thirty-five years of inquiry, reflection, and Speculation. Many pages recall 
scenes in India, and friends, Natives and E nglish, loved and valued, whom I shall see no more. The 
first Essay was written when I was actin gas private secretary to Sir Henry Lawrence in the camp of 
Lords Hardinge and Gough, at the gates of Lahore, the capture of which is an old story now. The 
"Indian District during a Rebellion’ was written in the camp of Lord Canning, at Allahabdd, while 
Str Colin Campbell was still beleaguering Lakhnau. The Civil Fudge decided his cases in one part 
of North India ; the Collector got in his Land Revenue in another, at a distance of many hundred 
leagues from each other ; but for any success in either vocation I was indebted to the rare good fortune 
Of having sat at the feet of Lord Lawrence, and learnt my lesson Srom the greatest of administrators, 
Some were written in the tent under the shade of the mango-grove, or in the solitary Staging-bungalow, 
Notes for others were jotted down on a log in a native utllage, or in a boat floating down one of the 
hive rivers on the track of Alexander the Great, or in an excursion in the mountuins of the Himdlaya. 
The materials for others were collected in Palestine, Ltaly, France, Germany, and Russia, and pillaged 
from men and books in many languages, European and Asiatic. Such as they are, they reflect the turn 
of thought, the employment, the studies, and, no doubt, the weaknesses of the writer, viz., an ardent 
love for the people of India, a fearless spirit of inquiry into the history of the past, and a tendency to 
cast off all conventional shackles in the search for truth, and to look upon men of all ages and countries 
as stamped in the same mould, deformed by the same weaknesses, and elevated by the same innate 
nobility, 
«Some of the last words of my master, Lord Lawrence, in India were, ‘Be kind to the natives. 
ZL would go even further, and say, ‘Take an interest in and try to love them.’ T, hey are the heirs 
(perhaps the spendthrift heirs) of an ancient, but still surviving civilisation, And how far superior 
are they to the modern Egyptian, or dweller of Mesopotamia, the bankrupt heirs of a still more ancient 
but exhausted civilisation! How superior are they to the Equatorial and T, vopical African, who never 
had any civilisation at all! It seems a special privilege to have lived a quarter of a century amidst 
Such a people as the inhabitants of Northern India, who are bone of our Arian bone, if not flesh of our 
Occidental culture: a people with History, Arts, Sciences. Literature, and Religion not to be surpassed, 
if equalled, by the Chinese and Fapanese, who, like the Indians, Sor so many centuries sat apart from, 
and uninfiuenced by, the long splendour of the Greek and Roman civilisation, which had overshadowed 
the rest of the world,""—EXTRACT FROM PREFACE, 
London; TRUBNER & CO., Ludgate Hill, 
