CXXVIII. To J. Shore, Esq. Crishna-nagur, Oct. 10, 1787. I HOPE, in less than a fortnight, to see you in perfect health, as I shall leave this charming retreat on the 20th. I want but a few leaves of having read your copy of Hafez twice through; and I am obliged to you for the most agreeable task (next the Shah-nameh) I ever performed. The annexed elegy* was The elegy alluded to is the following: PHILEMON. AN ELEGY. Where shade yon yews the church-yard's lonely bourn, While Evening pours her deepening glooms around. No rolling peal he heeds, cold blast, nor shower. And ere distraction came, all sense was fled. sent to me by the post; and I send it to you, because I think you will like it. There is a great pathos in the fourth tetrastick; and I know, unhappily, that excessive grief is neither full of tears, nor full of words; yet if a dramatic poet were to represent such grief naturally, I doubt whether his conduct would be approved, though, with fine acting and fine sounds in the orchestra, it ought to have a wonderful effect. Lady J. is pretty well; a tiger, about a month old, who is suckled by a goat, and has all the gentleness of his foster-mother, is now playing at her feet: I call him Jupiter. Adieu. CXXIX. To Dr. Ford. Gardens, on the Ganges, Jan. 5, 1788. GIVE me leave to recommend to your kind attentions colonel Polier, who will deliver this to you at Oxford. He presents to the university an extremely rare work in Sanscrit, a copy of the four vedas, or Indian scriptures, which confirm, instead of opposing, the Mosaic account of the creation and of Now time has calm'd, not cured, Philemon's woe; And still each year's collected sorrows flow, As drooping o'er his Emma's tomb he sighs. the deluge. He is himself one of the best-disposed and best-informed men, who ever left India. If he embark to-morrow, I shall not be able to send you, by him, an Arabic manuscript, which I have read with a native of Mecca, the poems of the great Ali. * Our return to Europe is very distant ; but I hope, before the end of the eighteenth century, to have the pleasure of conversing with you, and to give you a good account of Persia, through which I purpose to return. CXXX. To Sir Joseph Banks. Gardens, near Calcutta, Feb. 25, 1788. I WAS highly gratified by your kind letter, and have diffused great pleasure among our astronomers here, by showing them an account of the lunar volcano. The Brahmans, to whom I have related the discovery, in Sanscrit, are highly delighted with it. Public business presses on me so heavily at this season, that I must postpone the pleasure of writing fully to you, till I can retire in the long vacation to my cottage, where I hear nothing of plaintiffs or defendants. Your second commission I will faith fully execute, and have already made inquiries concerning the dacca cotton; but I shall be hardly able to procure the seeds, &c. before the Rodney sails. CXXXI. To Marquis Cornwallis, the Governor-General. MY LORD, IT has long been my wish to address the government of the British dominions in India on the administration of justice among the natives of Bengal and Bahar; a subject of equal importance to the appellate jurisdiction of the supreme court at Calcutta, where the judges are required by the legislature to decide controversies between Hindu and Mohammedan parties, according to their respective laws of contracts, and of succession to property: they had, I believe, so decided them, in most cases, before the statute to which, I allude, had passed; and the parliament only confirmed that mode of decision, which the obvious principles of justice had led them before to adopt. Nothing indeed could be more obviously just, than to determine private contests according to those laws, which the parties themselves had ever considered as the rules of their conduct and engagements in civil life; nor could any thing be wiser, than, by a legislative act, to assure the Hindu and Mussulman subjects of Great Britain, that the private laws which they severally held sacred, and a violation of which they would have thought the most grievous oppression, should not be superseded by a new system, of which they could have no knowledge, and which they must have considered as imposed on them by a spirit of rigour and intolerance. So far the principle of decision between the native parties in a cause appears perfectly clear; but the difficulty lies (as in most other cases) in the application of the principle to practice; for the Hindu and Mussulman laws are locked up, for the most part, in two very difficult languages, Sanscrit and Arabic, which few Europeans will ever learn, because neither of them leads to any advantage in worldly pursuits: and if we give judgment only from the opinions of the native lawyers and scholars, we can never be sure that we have not been deceived by them. It would be absurd and unjust to pass an indiscriminate censure on so considerable a body of men; but my experience justifies me in declaring, that I could not, with an easy conscience, concur in a decision, merely on the written opinion of native lawyers, in any cause in which they could have the remotest interest in misleading the court; nor, how vigilant soever we might be, would it be very difficult for them to mislead us; for a single obscure text, explained by themselves, might be quoted as express authority, though, perhaps, in the very book from which it was selected, it might be differently explained, or introduced only for the purpose of being exploded, The obvious remedy for this evil had occurred to me before I left England, where I had communicated my sentiments to some friends |