decline in India before the aggressive spirit of Brahminism. Buddhist missionaries, however, had been actively engaged in propagating their religion. Nepal had adopted Buddhism in the sixth century. A Mongol historian places its introduction into Tibet in the year 371 A.D., but the Tibetan historians record that this did not happen till the second half of the seventh century. This is also the date of a great persecution in India when numbers of Buddhist missionaries were forced to quit the country, and sought a home in neighbouring lands. Tibet was at that time ruled by a king named Srongatan Gampo. He had two wives, one of whom was a Nepalese princess, the other a Chinese, and these are said to have been devoted adherents of Buddhism. It is related that this king sent a mission to India in the year 632 A.D. The outcome of it gave to Tibet an alphabet based on the Sanskrit, and forthwith began the translation into Tibetan of the sacred books of the Buddhists. This work continued, amid interruptions, till the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when a great revival of Buddhism took place in Tibet, and several learned men from India settled in the country.

The Tibetan sacred literature consists of two collections, the Kanjur and the Tanjur. The Kanjur forms about 100 printed volumes, and comprising 1,083 different works. The Tanjur consists of 225 folio volumes, each weighing from four to five pounds in the edition of Peking. The edition of the Kanjur published at Peking sold for £600. They were first printed in Tibet at the beginning of the eighteenth century with wooden blocks after the Chinese method. But the majority of the large monasteries have printing-presses of their own. The hundred volumes of the Kanjur contain 1,083 distinct works, and are held to enshrine the words of Buddha preserved by tradition, while the Tanjur, forming about 4,000 distinct works, consists of commentaries on the religious works of the Kanjur, and comprises also treatises on philosophy, rhetoric, grammar, astrology, medicine, etc. Of this immense cyclopædia there are two copies at St. Petersburg, one at Calcutta, and one in the National Library at Paris, and one in the India Office Library, London.

Csoma was not content, however, to rest on his laurels gained in what was to him a field by the way. He was as far as ever from the goal he had set before himself at the outset. When asked to return to Europe, he wished, he said, to remain for yet other ten years to make further researches. Although fiftyeight years of age, he set out from Calcutta and purposed making for Lhasa in the first instance, where he hoped to find immense stores of unknown literature, and to learn much from the lamas of the East, who were more learned than those of the West, where he had as yet alone studied. In the early part of 1842 he set out on this journey for Lhasa. His method of travel

was extremely slow, performing much of the way on foot. He had in this manner to cross the Terai. In crossing these malarious reaches of jungle and swamp it is necessary, on pain of contracting fever, to cross them quickly and in the daytime. To stay over night is certain death. Csoma was unable to cross in good time, and was forced to spend a night in the Terai. He reached Darjeeling on the 24th of March, but on the 6th of April he fell ill with fever, and after a lingering illness of six days he expired. An account has been given of these last days of the Hungarian traveller and Tibetan scholar by the Government agent of Darjeeling. Csoma would enter upon the object of his travels and the problems he wished to solve. He came again and again over the discoveries he confidently believed were yet to be made by him. And as his end drew near, he became the more communicative regarding the original home of his own people. Although he did not live to carry out this aim, his work in the Tibetan field gives him a foremost place in the honour roll of travellers and original investigators. His self-sacrifice, modesty, and perseverance accomplished an amount of work which nothing but a life heroically devoted could have done. The Bengal Asiatic Society voted one thousand rupees for the purpose of erecting over his grave a suitable monument. This has been placed by the Government on the list of public monuments, under the immediate care of the Public Works Department, in order that it may be carefully kept in good repair. The epitaph is a graceful tribute to his memory by his friends of the Society: "Alexander Csoma de Körös, a native of Hungary, who, to follow out philological researches, resorted to the East, and after years passed under privations such as have been seldom endured, and patient in labour in the cause of science, compiled a Dictionary and Grammar of the Tibetan language, his best and real monument.”

THE COLLEGE CLOCK.

A TALE OF TWO LORD RECTORS.

BY J. L. JOYNES.

THERE had been a rivalry between the two houses for centuries. But that the mere spirit of competition should be emphasised by blood-guiltiness and accentuated by murder-for this is what it practically amounted to--this was a luxury in sensations which the hum-drum inhabitants of the sleepy town of Homer had no right whatever to expect, and one which, to do them full justice, they certainly never thought of expecting.

The interest of the town of Homer centred, as you might suppose it would, in its college. For this there was surely ample reason. It was not so much that the tradesmen in the town, and the washerwomen in its outskirts, had any very high opinion of the classical lore with which the bald head of each individual college dignitary was reputed to be full almost to bursting, although they were ready to admit that there was probably something special (by way of compensation to its owner) in the interior of a skull whose outside had so very little to boast of, but there were many more substantial reasons for the reverence with which the town beheld the college. To mention one of these will suffice. The college had great possessions, and the town of Homer itself constituted no inconsiderable part of them. Ancestral endowments had placed the college in the advantageous position of landlord and capitalist rolled into one; consequently the townsmen could not call their souls their own without the express permission-and that might be withdrawn at any one of the four yearly audit dinners-of the august collegiate body.

Thus the position was this. The townsmen, by continuous industry, managed to produce a large amount both of the luxuries and the necessaries of life. These they handed over, as in duty bound, to the college authorities; and the college authorities, in graceful recognition of a duty duly accomplished, returned to them such quantity of the necessaries which they had themselves produced as was found-after some rather painful experiments -to be quite sufficient to keep most of them in an average state of health and decency. For this concession the Lord had made

the townsmen truly thankful, and thus all parties were satisfied, and nobody had the smallest right to complain.

A

It is true that the college almswomen had a standing grievance, being all agreed upon one point, though they quarrelled upon every other, and their point was this-that a shilling a week was not enough to keep body and soul together. reference to the records proved conclusively that this had not been uniformly the view adopted even by the almswomen themselves upon so nice a question, since-in an antiquity certainly somewhat remote-a shilling was a sufficiently large sum to buy an entire ox, and to roast him whole into the bargain. Now an almswoman with an ox roasted whole on her hands might sit down to supper without the smallest fear as to the provision of the morrow's breakfast, unless the weather happened to be inordinately hot; but times had changed, and of late years the owners of fat oxen had peremptorily declined to roast them whole, and hand them over to the almswomen in return for the receipt of that discredited coin.

But this is by the way. Our tale has to do with the Lord Rectors of the college of Homer, and by no means with its almswomen.

The Lord Rector had very little work to do, and was, consequently, looked up to as the most important person in the place, and by outsiders was regarded absolutely with reverence as the worthy representative of a college of such honourable antiquity, that you could not, either literally or metaphorically, have found a single bit of wood in all its edifices which was not decidedly wormeaten. The edifices themselves were of great interest to antiquarians, and history was inscribed upon the panelling of its ancient halls in the shape of numberless illustrious names of the noble persons who had been educated in its precincts. The halo which hung about the holy shade of its mouldering arches was concentrated round the central figure of its dignified Lord Rector.

In the times of which I write, before the ancient statutes had been swept away by the zeal of the impetuous reformer, the college was governed and preserved in the purity of its original traditions by a select body of venerable " Fellows." Long years of scholastic service in the college had qualified these fellows for their eminent position; and whenever they took their walks abroad, they seemed to step with the proud consciousness of having detected more "false quantities" in their lives than any other members of their profession. To this rule, however, of long scholastic service, the wisdom of our ancestors had, as was right and reasonable, provided the proverbial exception. There were two families whose connection with the college stood on an entirely different footing, being, in fact, hereditary, and not accidental. There was a jingling resemblance between their

respective surnames, the name of the one family being Hudson, and the name of the other Judson. It was exclusively from these two families that the long roll of Lord Rectors had been appointed.

The original framers of the statutes had seen the disadvantage that must always attend the frequent change of occupancy of so important a post as the Lord Rectorship, and they had wisely provided against its frequency by a special statute of a somewhat curious kind. For by this they enacted not only that the office should be held for life, but that upon the Lord Rector's decease, his successor should be that member of the families of Hudson and Judson who should have most recently taken his Master's degree at one of the universities. The result of this unusual arrangement was that an interval of from fifty to sixty years generally elapsed between each appointment to the Rectorship. For persons in such comfortable circumstances live long, and it was most unusual for a Lord Rector to vacate the office without having "come to four-score years" and yet having seen very little either of labour or sorrow in the course of his long career. Upon his lamented demise an extremely young man, of course, became his successor; sometimes his grandson,-upon one memorable occasion his great-grandson,-but always either a Hudson or a Judson of about five-and-twenty years of age.

Now it so happened that, whether by skilful calculation in their matrimonial arrangements, or by pure luck as regards the date of the Lord Rector's decease, or by a combination of both, the Hudsons had supplied four successive Rectors from their own family. Thus the Rectorship had already been exclusively in their hands for more than two centuries, whereat, considering the emoluments connected with the office, the Hudsons had substantial reason to rejoice, while the Judsons had corresponding reason to be jealous.

The time was, however, approaching when it seemed likely that this long period of uninterrupted ill-fortune for the Judsons would take a turn for the better. The then Lord Rector, a Hudson as usual, had already reached the mature age of eighty, and was beginning to show some symptoms of breaking up. The youngest Judson had just taken his degree, and although before this ceremony was performed the Judson family had felt extreme solicitude about the Lord Rector's failing health, when once it was completed, their interest waned, and they looked forward with truly Christian resignation to the inevitable approach of the day when Rector Hudson should finally lay aside his gouty slippers, and the youngest of their own family should step into his shoes. For this course of events seemed a practical certainty, and not even the most "honest doubter" in the world could have urged, with any kind of plausibility, that the next Lord Rector might possibly not be a Judson after all.