THSANG; descriptive of the Buddhist country of India in the seventh century.[1] [Footnote 1: _Mémoires sur les Contrées Occidentales_, traduites du Sanscrit en Chinois, en l'an 648, par M. STANISLAS JULIEN.] It is with pain that I advert to that portion of the section which treats of the British rule in Ceylon; in the course of which the discovery of the private correspondence of the first Governor, Mr. North, deposited along with the Wellesley Manuscripts, in the British Museum[1], has thrown an unexpected light over the fearful events of 1803, and the massacre of the English troops then in garrison at Kandy. Hitherto the honour of the British Government has been unimpeached in these dark transactions; and the slaughter of the troops has been uniformly denounced as an evidence of the treacherous and "tiger-like" spirit of the Kandyan people.[2] But it is not possible now to read the narrative of these events, as the motives and secret arrangements of the Governor with the treacherous Minister of the king are disclosed in the private letters of Mr. North to the Governor-general of India, without feeling that the sudden destruction of Major Davie's party, however revolting the remorseless butchery by which it was achieved, may have been but the consummation of a revenge provoked by the discovery of the treason concocted by the Adigar in confederacy with the representative of the British Crown. Nor is this construction weakened by the fact, that no immediate vengeance was exacted by the Governor in expiation of that fearful tragedy; and that the private letters of Mr. North to the Marquis of Wellesley contain avowals of ineffectual efforts to hush up the affair, and to obtain a clumsy compromise by inducing the Kandyan king to make an admission of regret. [Footnote 1: Additional MSS., Brit. Mus., No. 13864, &c.] [Footnote 2: DE QUINCEY, _collected Works_, vol. xii. p. 14.] I am aware that there are passages in the following pages containing statements that occur more than once in the course of the work. But I found that in dealing with so many distinct subjects the same fact became sometimes an indispensable illustration of more than one topic; and hence repetition was unavoidable even at the risk of tautology. I have also to apologise for variances in the spelling of proper names, both of places and individuals, occurring in different passages. In extenuation of this, I can only plead the difficulty of preserving uniformity in matters dependent upon mere sound, and unsettled by any recognised standard of orthography. I have endeavoured in every instance to append references to other authors, in support of statements which I have drawn from previous writers; an arrangement rendered essential by the numerous instances in which errors, that nothing short of the original authorities can suffice to expose, have been reproduced and repeated by successive writers on Ceylon.