ect and education. A division of labour seems most
conducive to this end. We want a class of interpreters, men such as M.
Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, who are fully competent to follow and to
control the researches of professional students, and who at the same
time have not forgotten the language of the world.

[Footnote 53: M. de St. Hilaire resigned the chair of Greek literature
at the College de France after the _coup d'etat_ of 1851, declining to
take the oath of allegiance to the existing government.]

In his work on Buddhism, of which a second edition has just appeared,
M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire has undertaken to give to the world at
large the really trustworthy and important results which have been
obtained by the laborious researches of Oriental scholars, from the
original documents of that interesting and still mysterious religion.
It was a task of no ordinary difficulty, for although these researches
are of very recent date, and belong to a period of Sanskrit
scholarship posterior to Sir W. Jones and Colebrooke, yet such is the
amount of evidence brought together by the combined industry of
Hodgson, Turnour, Csoma de Koeroes, Stanislas Julien, Foucaux, Fausboell,
Spence Hardy, but above all, of the late Eugene Burnouf, that it
required no common patience and discrimination in order to compose
from such materials so accurate, and at the same time so lucid and
readable a book on Buddhism as that which we owe to M. Barthelemy
Saint-Hilaire. The greater part of it appeared originally in the
'Journal des Savants,' the time-honoured organ of the French Academy,
which counts on its staff the names of Cousin, Flourens, Villemain,
Biot, Mignet, Littre, &c, and admits as contributors sixteen only of
the most illustrious members of that illustrious body, _la creme de la
creme_.

Though much had been said and written about Buddhism,--enough to
frighten priests by seeing themselves anticipated in auricular
confession, beads, and tonsure by the Lamas of Tibet,[54] and to
disconcert philosophers by finding themselves outbid in positivism and
nihilism by the inmates of Chinese monasteries,--the real beginning of
an historical and critical study of the doctrines of Buddha dates from
the year 1824. In that year Mr. Hodgson announced the fact that the
original documents of the Buddhist canon had been preserved in
Sanskrit in the monasteries of Nepal. Before that time our information
on Buddhism had been derived at random from