1832.] Asiatic Society. 565 



life was spent in scanning the contents of the Mahabharata and Puranas, and 

 comparing tliera, often hastily and fancifully, with the results of an uncommonly 

 extensive and recondite western reading, we cannot fail to notice the far more useful 

 as well as more critical, labour, which you have bestowed on those huge treasures of 

 Hindu mythology and tradition. Of the first and most classical of these poems, 

 you are about to give a splendid Sanscrit edition to the public. But your analysis 

 of the contents of this, of the 18 Puranas, and several Upapuranas,with translations 

 interspersed of the most curious and interesting portions of each, is a work of which 

 the literary merit,and importance to all future inquirers into Hindu fable or history, 

 can scarely be estimated too highly. It is indeed unpublished : but the 20 folio MS. 

 volumes containing it, hold a most distinguished place among the many valuable 

 gifts for which the library of this Society is indebted to you. We cannot but in- 

 dulge the hope, that the older and far more difficult monuments of Hindu anti- 

 quity, the V£das, may hereafter receive that illustration from you which no 

 other scholar, with the exception perhaps of Mr. Colebrooke, is fully competent to 

 afford them. 



Hitherto it is in reference to Sanscrit studies only, or the dialects immediate- 

 ly connected with it, that we have considered your unrivalled claims to our 

 gratitude, and that of the literary world : but it will not have escaped the atten- 

 tion of any one acquainted with the works alluded to, the History of Cashmir 

 especially, how well you have availed yourself of the collateral assistance, which 

 the accurate knowledge of other Eastern languages has supplied. In the great 

 work which you gratuitously undertook of arranging and describing the very large 

 unformed collections of that indefatigable traveller and antiquary, the late Colonel 

 Colin Mackenzie, you had to apply that knowledge to a variety of interesting 

 objects separately. And, in the full description of the result of this six years' la- 

 bour, which you published in Calcutta in two octavo volumes in 1828, a work in 

 which Sanscrit books and monuments hold the chief, but by no means the only 

 place, every reader must admire the happy critical attention which your active 

 mind could bestow on so many objects, each sufficient to engross the attention of 

 an ordinary scholar, collected from such various quarters, and comprised in so 

 many difficult languages. 



It cannot but enhance greatly the admiration with which we view these illustri- 

 ous contributions to the stock of Asiatic learning, when we consider, that your 

 time, from your first arrival in the country, has been occupied in official 

 duties of an important and difficult character, totally unconnected with literature : 

 and that the severe scientific studies of your own profession also (in which your 

 merits have been recently acknowledged by those most competent to estimate 

 them) have not, amidst this double distraction, been neglected. Nor can we but 

 be greatly struck with the fact, that amidst occupations so various, so arduous, 

 and so honourable, you could undertake the province (which inferior minds 

 might have been delegated to perform, though they could not have performed so 

 well,) of preparing elementary works in English for the instruction of Hindu, 

 youth, and even devoting a large portion of your time to the activesuperintendance 

 of their yet infant seminaries of education. Still more, when we find, that from a 

 complication of employments sufficient to distract or overwhelm the mass even of 

 clever men, your mind could not only unbend itself in the lighter departments of 

 elegant literature and art, but find ease and diversion in the hardness of statistical 



