Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 25

EARLIER EDITIONS
xix
which, like the two former MSS., was sent to England and
now in the India Office Library. One copy of this, I may
is
mention, was taken by the
Abbe
lished in the original French.
to France, and was pub-
The number issued was
however small, and copies of it are now almost unprocurable.
And another copy of the MS. was left in the records of Fort
This last-named copy I have carefully com-
St. George.
pared with the English translation which has hitherto been
available to the public, and the comparison has shown me
how vastly superior in every way (I might say every page)
is the Abbe's later and unpublished work as contrasted
with his first draft, composed sixteen years earlier, which
despite its imperfections has enjoyed so
amongst English students
It
is
of
much
popularity
Hinduism.
certainly very strange that all the facts which I have
detailed above have never before attracted attention,
and
that although copies of the Abbe's finally completed work
are to be found in the records of the India Office
Government
and
of the
Madras, it has never before been discovered
that the published English edition is not in reality a com-
plete or true representation of the Abbe's long labours in
the field of original research. For all that, however, this
edition has been largely drawn upon by English writers,
chief
of
amongst
whom we may
mention
Mill, the historian of
have
acknowledged the assistance it afforded them, and in the
British Museum there is a co py of it containing a manuscript
note by Coleridge which shows that the poet had gone to
it for inspiration.
This is the honestest book of the kind,'
Coleridge pronounced, 'as written by a Frenchman, that
I have ever read.'
Now, if this faulty English edition has been so widely
consulted and so frequently extolled, an English edition
of the Abbe's revised work ought to be infinitely more
India, while Oriental students like Professor Wilson
'