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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
of a library, but that they might be made to yield the information they might contain. That these expectations have not been wholly disappointed is due, I am sorry to say, to no zeal or acquirement native to the soil; and the books in the Society's possession have done little more than repose in dust and oblivion upon the shelves where they were originally deposited.
The accumulations of Mr. Hodgson have, however, not been made in vain. The Tibetan volumes especially were fortunate in finding an expounder in Alexander Csoma Körösi, whose ardent aspirations after knowledge led him, penniless and friendless, from Transylvania to Ladakh, where, with the aid of our equally adventurous countryman Moorcroft, he was enabled to study and to master the language of Tibet. Placed subsequently in communication with the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, he devoted much of his time to the examination of the volumes of the Kah-gyur, and has given the results of his labour to the public in the Journals of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and in the 20th Vol. of the Researches; he has also afforded, by a grammar and dictionary of Tibetan, the means of prosecuting the cultivation of the language in Europe; and the Transactions of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburgh, as well as other publications, evince the scholarship of Mr. Schmidt in Tibetan as well as in the literature of the Mongols. We have also a very valuable contribution to the History of Buddhism in a life of Buddha, translated originally from Sanskrit into Tibetan, and from that language into French, and
