Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/134

"Mr. F. S. Growse's "Mathurá is full of interest for the general reader, and of great value to the scholar and the student. Indeed, it is in the front rank of its kind. Dealing exhaustively with a city which is to this day the Jerusalem of the largest division of the Hindu sects, and whose history embraces over two thousand years, it is a veritable mine of information of every sort-antiquarian and philological, literary and artistic, biographical and legendary, topographical and historical—all set forth with exemplary concision and completeness. Mathurá (better known as Muttra) is the seat of an exquisite art of stone-carving; and Mr. Growse who seems gifted with a universality of accomplishment, has turned this to good account, in his restorations of ancient buildings, and in the construction of new. His view that the buildings erected in India by western Missionaries should be eastern in architecture is a sound one, and he has embodied it to some purpose in his Roman Catholic Chapel. Archaeologists and lovers of Indian art must be always grateful to him for his untiring efforts to rescue priceless "finds" from destruction: just as Hindi scholars must appreciate his researches in local literature. A feature of the present edition is the very luminous and valuable chapter on the etymology of local names. The book, which is excellently illustrated in autotype, is the outcome of a wide sympathy, a trained intelligence, and a judicious taste."—Magazine of Art.