ntific kind, which he thinks suited for prizes, the task will not
be difficult; and, with his help, I will gladly undertake it. There is a
marked distinction between a prize book and a school book. A prize book
ought to be a book which a boy receives with pleasure, and turns over
and over, not as a task, but spontaneously. I have not forgotten my own
school-boy feelings on this subject. My pleasure at obtaining a prize
was greatly enhanced by the knowledge that my little library would
receive a very agreeable addition. I never was better pleased than when
at fourteen I was master of Boswell's Life of Johnson, which I had long
been wishing to read. If my master had given me, instead of Boswell, a
Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, or a Geographical Class book, I should
have been much less gratified by my success."

The idea had been started of paying authors to write books in the
languages of the country. On this Macaulay remarks

"To hire four or five people to make a literature is a course which
never answered and never will answer, in any part of the world.
Languages grow. They cannot be built. We are now following the slow but
sure course on which alone we can depend for a supply of good books in
the vernacular languages of India. We are attempting to raise up a large
class of enlightened natives. I hope that, twenty years hence, there
will be hundreds, nay thousands, of natives familiar with the best
models of composition, and well acquainted with Western science. Among
them some persons will be found who will have the inclination and the
ability to exhibit European knowledge in the vernacular dialects. This
I believe to be the only way in which we can raise up a good vernacular
literature in this country."

These hopeful anticipations have been more than fulfilled. Twice twenty
years have brought into existence, not hundreds or thousands, but
hundreds of thousands, of natives who can appreciate European knowledge
when laid before them in the English language, and can reproduce it in
their own. Taking one year with another, upwards of a thousand works of
literature and science are published annually in Bengal alone, and
at least four times that number throughout the entire continent. Our
colleges have more than six thousand students on their books, and two
hundred thousand boys are receiving a liberal education in schools of
the higher order. For the improvement of the mass of the people, nearly
seven thousand young