No. 36.— 1888.] 



CAPTAIN JO AO RIBEIUO. 



271 



happily, I am able to clear the character of the reverend 

 translator to some extent, though not entirely ; and that in a 

 rather curious way. After the death of the late lamented 

 scholar Dr. Arthur Burnell, his valuable library was sold (in 

 1884) by Mr. Bernard Quaritch, the well known antiquarian 

 bookseller of London, and some of the books came into my 

 possession, among them being a manuscript thus described 

 in the catalogue : — "Ribeyro (J.). Historia Oriental (in Por- 

 tuguese), three books, 4to., 203 pp., old calf." When it 

 reached my hands I saw that it was Ribeiro's work on Ceylon, 

 and I hoped that it might be the author's autograph manu- 

 script ; but a further examination soon showed me that this 

 was not the case. Owing to pressure of work in connection 

 with a daily newspaper, it was not until I was on furlough 

 in England in 1886 that I was able to look more carefully 

 into this manuscript, comparing it with the Lisbon edition 

 and Le Grand's French translation, the result being that 

 I made the interesting discovery that this was the identical 

 manuscript from which the Abbe le Grand made his transla- 

 tion. The proof of this will be given further on. Meanwhile, 

 let us examine the various editions of Le Grand's translation 

 of which the titles have been given above. 



As I have shown, the Trevoux edition was the original, the 

 Paris one being identical with it except for the title-page, so 

 that we may consider these two together. After the title-page 

 comes the Dedication, covering seven pages ; then the Author's 

 Preface of three pages ; the Translator's Preface, five pages ; 

 Explanation of Names of Ranks, &c, one page ; Table of the 

 Chapters, six pages ; various documents relating to the authori- 

 sation, &c, of the printing of the work, five pages ; and Errata, 

 one page. Then comes the body of the work, running from 

 page 1 to page 352, with four extra pages, 187-90, at the end of 

 Book I., which I shall explain presently. Book I. contains 

 twenty-five chapters, the first twenty -four corresponding to 

 those of the Portuguese original, except that chapters XVII. 

 and XVIII. are transposed. But chapter XXV. is an entire 

 interpolation of Le Grand's ; it treats of the islands in the 



