aspirations, which she
never understood. There is something piteous in the cobbler's daughter
marrying the apprentice to keep on the business, and finding him a genius
and a hero on her hands, starving, being laughed at, and at last carried
off to a strange land and fatal climate, all without the least
comprehension or sympathy for the cause, and her mind failing before the
material prosperity came, which she might have regarded as compensation.

In 1807, when some progress had been made, the grant for the translation
of the Scriptures was withdrawn; but the superintendents resolved to
persevere on their own account, and at the same time to collect all the
information in their power respecting the Christians in India, so as to
be able to rouse the cold hearts at home to the perception that a real
work was in progress. For this purpose, Dr. Claudius Buchanan, the
Provost of the College at Fort William, made an expedition of inquiry
among the various Christians, and his little book, "Christian
Researches," brought much before the public at home, of which they had
hitherto been ignorant.

Before his time the enormities of the worship of Jaghernauth, and the
horrors of the car, beneath which human victims threw themselves, had
hardly been realized; and his very effective style of writing brought
into full prominence the atrocities of the Suttee, or burning of widows
on the funeral pile, a custom with which it was supposed to be impossible
to interfere, but which has been proved to be entirely a corrupt
practice, unsanctioned by any ancient law, only encouraged by the
Brahmins out of avarice. Happily the present generation only knows of
these atrocities as almost proverbial expressions, but when the century
came in they were in full force.

It was Buchanan, too, who first revealed to the English the existence of
those Nestorian Christians of St. Thomas, on the coast of Malabar, who
had probably had no ecclesiastical intercourse with this country since
the embassy of King Alfred, nine hundred years before. He also brought
into public notice the effect of Swartz's labours, by describing a visit
that he made to Tanjore, where he had a most kind reception from
Serfojee, and greatly admired the numerous charitable foundations of that
beneficent Rajah. He also heard the services held in three languages in
Swartz's church, and was greatly struck, when the Tamul sermon began, by
hearing a universal scratching and grating all