318 Sir W. Elliot on Denholm and its Vicinity. 



cated to the Asiatic society on his arrival in Calcutta in 

 1806. There he was appointed professor of Hindi in the 

 college of Fort William, but resigned it for a more lucrative 

 post bestowed on him by Lord Minto, the better to prosecute 

 his studies. Thus he continued for four years, when on the 

 despatch of the expedition to Java in 1811, he accompanied 

 his patron the Governor-general as chief of the interpreters' 

 department. On the capture of Batavia he landed in search 

 of books, mss., &c., and venturing incautiously into the 

 underground library of a Dutch merchant, which in that 

 pestilential climate was filled with noxious air, he caught a 

 malignant fever which carried him off in three days, on the 

 28th August, 1811, in the 36th year of his age. 



Cut off in the prime of life and in the full career of his 

 investigations, we can only judge by what he had already 

 accomplished, of the loss sustained by oriental literature 

 through his premature death. '* The tree was struck when 

 covered with blossoms, ere fruit could be gathered, and its 

 desolate .branches and riven trunk told to the world the 

 saddest of tales,— of hope frustated, of manhood blighted, 

 of labour lost to the world."* 



In the six years passed in Scotland, after leaving college, 

 he acquired a tolerably competent knowledge of the leading 

 European and Semitic tongues. His preliminary disserta- 

 tion to the curious old poem "The complaynt of Scotland," 

 written for Constable's edition, exhibits a store of antiquarian 

 reading and an acquaintance with early northern literature, 

 especially that of Scotland, that drcAv forth the not always 

 readily accorded praise of Ritson. In the introduction to the 

 ballad of Tamlane,t drawn up for his friend Scott, he develops 

 the history of fairy mythology. A historical and philosophi- 

 cal sketch of the progress of African discovery published in 

 1799, was the result of a design he at one time entertained of 

 taking up the career of his countryman Mungo Park. For 

 a short time also he edited the Scots Magazine, contributing 

 several metrical translations from Norse, Icelandic, Hebrew, 

 Arabic, Persian, and other fugitive pieces, '^ indicating," says 

 one of his biographers, " more genius than taste." His 

 longest poem is " The Scenes of Infancy," which exhibits a 

 deep sense of the beauties of nature and an enthusiastic love 

 of home, without attaining to a high degree of poetic excel- 

 lence. 



* Calcutta Review, xxxi. 5. 



f Border Minstrelsy, vol. II., 167 ' 



