was the immediate cause of bringing forward Colebrooke, so that the mantle of the elder was actually caught as it fell by the younger scholar, who, although he had not yet appeared as an author, volunteered to complete the Digest of Hindu Law, which was left unfinished by Jones.
Charles Wilkins, indeed, had preceded him in the translation of several inscriptions in the first and second volumes of the Asiatic Researches, but his communications then ceased, and on Jones’ death in 1794 the public looked to Davis, Wilford, and Colebrooke for the materials of the next volume.
Samuel Davis had already written an excellent paper on Hindu astronomy, and a second on the Indian cycle of Jupiter; but he had no leisure for Sanskrit studies and his communications to the Asiatic Society now ceased altogether.
Francis Wilford, an officer of engineers, was of Swiss extraction. He was a good Classical and Sanskrit scholar, and his varied and extensive reading was successfully brought into use for the illustration of ancient Indian geography. But his judgment was not equal to his learning;[1] and his wild speculations on Egypt and on the Sacred Isles of the West, in the 3rd and 9th volumes of the Asiatic Researches, have dragged him down to a lower position than he is justly entitled to both by his abilities and his attainments. His “Essay on tho comparative Geography of India,” which was left unfinished at his death, and which was only published in 1851 at my earnest recommendation, is entirely free from the speculations of his earlier works, and is a living monument of the better judgment o f his latter days.
Henry Colebrooke was the worthy successor of Sir William Jones, and though his acquirements were, perhaps, not so varied as those of the brilliant founder of the Society, yet he possessed a scholarship equally accurate in both the Classical and Sanskrit languages. This soon ripened into a wide knowledge of Sanskrit literature, and his early mathematical bias and training, combined with a singularly
- ↑ H. H. Wilson, in his Hindu Theatre, I., 9, calls Wilford a “learned and laborious, but injudicious writer.
