Of the history of Marathas in those districts in which they are most prevalent, an account will be found in the Manuals and Gazetteers. The last Maratha King of Tanjore, Maharaja Sivaji, died in 1855. It is noted by Mr. M. J. Walhouse [5] that "an eye-witness has recorded the stately and solemn spectacle of his funeral, when, magnificently arranged, and loaded with the costliest jewels, his body, placed in an ivory palanquin, was borne by night through the torchlit streets of his royal city amid the wail of vast multitudes lamenting the last of their ruling race. The nearest descendant, a boy of twelve, was carried thrice round the pile, and at the last circuit a pot of water was dashed to pieces on the ground. The boy then lit the pile, and loud long-sustained lament of a nation filled the air as the flames rose." Upon the death of Sivaji, the Raj became, under the decision of the Court of Directors, extinct. His private estate was placed under the charge of the Collector of the district. In addition to three wives whom he had already married, Sivaji, three years before his death, married in a body seventeen girls. In 1907, three of the Ranis were still living in the palace at Tanjore. It is recorded [6] by the Marchioness of Dufferin that, when the Viceroy visited the Tanjore palace in 1886 to speak with the Ranis, he was admitted behind the purdah, "The ladies had not expected him, and were not dressed out in their best, and no one could speak any intelligible language, However, a sort of chattering went on, and they made signs towards a chair, which, being covered with crimson cloth, Dufferin thought he was to sit down on. He turned and was just about to do so, when he thought he saw a slight movement, and he fancied there might be a little dog there, when two women pulled the cloth open, and there was the principal Rani--a little old woman who reached half way up the back of the chair, and whom the Viceroy had been within an act of squashing. He said it gave him such a turn!" A classified index to the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Tanjore palace was published by Mr. A. C. Burnell in 1880. In the introduction thereto, he states that "the library was first brought to the notice of European scholars by H.S.H. Count Noer, Prince Frederic of Schleswig-Holstein, who brought an account of it to the late Professor Goldstücker. But its full importance was not known till I was deputed, in 1871, to examine it by the then Governor of Madras, Lord Napier and Ettrick. The manuscripts are the result of perhaps 300 years' collections; firstly, by the Nayaks of Tanjore; secondly, after about 1675, by the Mahratha princes. Some of the palm-leaf manuscripts belong to the earlier period, but the greater part were collected in the last and present centuries. All the Nagari Manuscripts belong to the Mahratha times, and a large number of these were collected at Benares by the Raja Serfojee (Carabhoji) about fifty years ago."