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and to raise scholars great though few.* Two Scholarships were established, with an annual stipend of fifty pounds each, and have been held by some not unknown to India. The position of Wilson as a scholar is best marked out in the words of his colleagues in the Asiatic Society-" none after Sir W. Jones, if even he is to be excepted, has stronger claims on our grateful recollection; none certainly more long-continued ones." India may then be well represented by him, along with such as Forbes, Eastwick, Williams, Hodgson, Ouseley, Hayes, Ballantyne, Stevenson, Dr. Wilson, Caldwell, Roer and Sprenger.

There is one subject of, at once, regret and astonishment, however that none of the natives of India should have ever yet distinguished themselves as philologists, or even as eager and accomplished students of their own sacred language. Notwithstanding the extent to which English education is supposed to have opened up the philosophy and science of the West to the students of the East, no step has been taken by those who might have been supposed to be best qualified, to simplify the grammar of the Sanskrit, or on the basis of it to carry out philological enquiries and researches. A few in very recent times may have in the "Bibliotheca Indica," edited Sanskrit works, accompanied occasionally by notes and translations, or may, as in the Encyclopædia Bengalensis, have attempted to transfer ruthlessly and arbitrarily the knowledge of the West to the East: a Sanskrit college and a Madrissa may have been in existence for years, and have cost the State large sums of money that might have been better applied; but we look in vain for fruit that is worth plucking. No advance has been made beyond the unphilological but otherwise excellent systems of Panini, Ramchunder and Vopadeva, unless we allow that Rammohun Roy has aided our Science by any of his works or translations. His is the honour,

* BODEN SCHOLARS.

1833.-William Alder Strange, Scholar of Pembroke. Edward Price, Magdalen Hall.

1834. Solomon Cæsar Malan, St. Edmund Hall. 1837.-Arthur Wellington Wallis, Magdalen Hall.

1838.-William Henry Jones, Magdalen Hall.

1839.-William Henry Linwood, Student of Ch.

1840.-Robert Payne Smith, Scholar of Pembroke.

1841.-Alexander Penrose Forbes, Brasenose, now Bishop of Brechin.

1843.-Monier Williams, University, now Professor of Sanskrit, Haileybury

College.

1844.- Edward Markham Heale, Queen's.

1845.-Robert Hake, Commoner of St. Edmund Hall, now Chaplain of New

College.

1848.-Thomas Hutchinson Tristram, Exhibitioner of Lincoln.

1849.-Nov. 24-Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith, Queen's.

1853.-Feb. 22-John Frederick Browne, Exeter.

which must be shared with Carey, of having made the Bengali a language capable of literary polish, and of becoming a powerful instrument for good to those whose vernacular it is. When a mere youth he studied Arabic and Persian at Patna, and afterwards, at Benares, he devoted himself with enthusiasm to the Sanskrit. At the age of twenty-two he began the study of English, and in the course of time obtained a respectable knowledge of it. His first literary work was a translation of the Vedant into Bengali, then Hindustani and afterwards English. He translated the Kuth Upanishad, and in the course of the controversy that he raised as to the Unity of God, and the absurdities of Hinduism, his active pen was seldom idle. Born in 1774, he visited England in 1831, and died there in 1833.

We believe that a knowledge of the laws, principles and spirit of Comparative Philology, is at present a great desideratum in native education in India. The want of it has laid all natives open to the accusation of being merely white-washed with English, merely crammed with a certain amount of words and literature, which they cannot use with the power of a master, nor express idiomatically. The hitherto superficial character of all such education has arisen from a want of applying the teachings of our Science. Native teachers do not themselves know it, and hence cannot communicate it, while those Europeans who have been introduced into the Education Service, have been employed in positions where it is too late to begin the study, so as to make it useful by causing it to enter into the intellectual nature of the student. The whole system of education by natives in India must be changed, ere any permanent good can be accomplished. In England the work begins in the infant school, with the child of three or four years of age. Early accustomed to the accurate division of words into syllables, to an acquaintance with the powers of letters and their proper pronunciation, he is trained soon to see the power of syllables as to meaning and origin, to break up words into their component parts, to point out the root, the prefix, the affix, and to understand the changes which the root undergoes in combination with these. At the age of ten or twelve years he is introduced to Latin, and in it finds all the complex structure of the classical languages. His ideas of words and their importance extended, his sphere of linguistic vision is increased. He learns the power of a root in relation to its termination, he begins to know that words as well as nations have a history, that there are various stages in that history, and that each denotes a great leap in the mind of the nation. Words soon have for him a living existence, they become a part of his intellectual life, and he can use them, by long practice, with the skill of the DEC., 1857.

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potter over his plastic clay. He speedily discerns differences between, not merely the words of one language, but those of several; every new fact adds to his intellectual wealth; harmonies and agreements meet and astonish him at every turn; every new language that he learns fits him the more easily to overcome the difficulties of another, for he finds that not only words, but grammatical forms are the same. The result is that he instinetively classifies and generalises for himself; by the pleasant discipline the mind is elevated and strengthened; by the linguistic wealth his ideas become clearer, fuller and more accurate, and when he strives to express them, he clothes them in a dress of exquisite taste or glorious beauty. He may be said fully to understand and correctly to use the languages that he professes to know, for he can give a history of every word, and account for every grammatical form. Then and not till then, does the study of literature, in the highest sense of the term, become desirable or proper, and for him the pages of the author glow with beauty or are filled with thought. There is not an idea but what is fully understood, not a figure but what is correctly appreciated. Words act upon ideas and ideas upon words, and a creative power is developed, which enables him to add to the literature of his country works that posterity will not willingly let die.

Such should be the effect of the study of Comparative Philology, properly carried out and fully applied. To do so requires rare skill in the teacher, much perseverance in the pupil. In England it is being partially done in the new and intellectual systems of education that are being adopted. In the higher schools it is well carried out; in systems for the lower schools it is at least the basis. It has never been so in India. Utilitarianism has raged rampant in most of our educational systems, and superficiality has been the result. Time-that important element in the development of thought and character, has been denied, instruction has been separated from morality, cramming has been preferred to disciplining, and the result is that the character has not been elevated, nor apathy and inaccuracy been removed. School books have utterly ignored proper linguistic training, and a graduated series of lessons for mechanical and unintelligent reading has alone been given. The fact that, in learning English, the native was learning a foreign language entirely objective to himself, has not been acted on, and hence harmonies and diversities of words and grammatical laws, between it and the vernacular, have not been noticed. College and scholarship examinations have perpetuated the evil, so much so that in the last Entrance Examination for the Calcutta University, out of 231 native students, not five could give an

intelligent account of the origin or literal meaning of the word incipient, while many could write elegant critiques on, or analyses of, Shakespeare's Plays, without once feeling in their inner soul their real power and beauty. The study of Comparative Philology will, we believe, largely check, if it do not entirely remove, this evil. But the present race of native teachers will never do it, and no Manual exists sufficiently simple or brought up to the latest stage of the Science, to enable students to do it for themselves. The work must begin with the young in their tenderest years; so that an 'instinct' of language may be acquired.

In this article we have not entered into the subject-matter of the Science at all, nor have we looked at it critically. Assuming a knowledge of it in its outlines, we have merely tried to answer the question, what has India done for it? Now it bids fair to go on advancing at once in linguistic data and philosophic principle. The former must, as in the case of Sir W. Jones, and his worthy successors, be still largely contributed by India, and for its accomplishment we have alluded to the Plan of Sir James Mackintosh. The latter, evolved by the German Schlegel, has been well carried out by Bopp, William Von Humboldt, and Bunsen. Whether more may be accomplished for the Science itself in its pure form we do not know; but this is certain, that as applied it has still a grand career to run, in connexion with its sister Sciences, Ethnology and Archæology, in dispelling the mysterious clouds that hang over the early history of the world, in bringing to life races, institutions and dynasties as wonderful as the existences revealed in the primeval world by Geology, but to the student of humanity and the Bible far more important, and in laying at the feet of Christianity, new and irrefragable evidences of the truth and inspiration of her Genesis-records.

ART. II.-The Revenue Hand-book, containing a short sketch of the Laws and Regulations in force, connected with the collections of the Government Revenues in Bengal, and the North-West Provinces. By JAMES HENRY YOUNG, Bengal Civil Service. Calcutta, 1855.

OF

F all the branches of the Grand Trunk of Revenue and Fiscal administration, we do not think there is one so universally reprobated as the Abkari. All the others, even the salt, have their defenders; and the opium, where distinct from the retail trade in it, as embraced in the Abkari department, is suffered without one-half the querulous grumblings that the word "Abkari" produces. We fancy the very grandness of their eneroachments carries with it its admirers and objectors, much as Napoleon found his, while Jack Sheppard is handed down to obloquy and contempt. And here again will be a shading off in comparative odium, for the Abkari department of the NorthWestern Provinces is less cavilled at, and less disliked, than the same department in lower (Eastern) Bengal, under the new system as it is called, in the same degree that Jack Sheppard is less contemned than his follower "Blueskin."

We believe no one will dispute that an Excise tax on spirituous liquors and intoxicating drugs, is a perfectly legitimate one; nay, we will go further and say, that where it is administered fairly, and with the aim in view, for which all civilized nations professedly uphold this tax-viz: to prevent an unrestricted and demoralizing use (then becoming an abuse) of a deleterious article, it is a necessary and incumbent one in a moral point of view; but where this aim and end is made subservient or secondary to the profit and loss of the Exchequer, the tax loses that virtue with which all right-minded men are willing to allow it to be invested, and becomes an unworthy means of replenishing the public purse, and not to be palliated in any nation bearing or boasting the distinction and designation of an enlightened Government.

Allowing then that the tax is a fair and legitimate one, how are we to account for the general distrust and dislike with which it is viewed on all hands. We are alluding more especially to the Abkari department of Bengal, for, as we before stated, we do not hear so much of that of the North-Western Provinces in the way of complaint; not we suppose that it is the perfection of an Excise tax, but that, from circumstances, it is not so often brought before the public. We may make allowances for the general dislike, which most men evince to any interference with

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