Jones’s own words, was “to find a person who, with a competent knowledge of the Sanscrit and Arabic, has a general acquaintance with the principles of jurisprudence, and a sufficient share even of legislative spirit, to arrange the plan of a digest, superintend the compilation of it, and render the whole, as it proceeds, into perspicuous English. Now (he continues), though I am truly conscious of possessing a very moderate portion of those talents which I should require in the superintendent of such a work, yet I may without vanity profess myself equal to the labour of it;—and I cannot but know that the qualifications required, even in the low degree in which I possess them, are not often found united in the same person.” The proposal of course was eagerly accepted. That he should have acquired the necessary acquaintance, first with the language, then with the law, in the space of four years and a half, is sufficiently remarkable; and the method in which he proposed to execute it will startle those who know the enervating influence of a tropical climate. “I should be able,” he says, “if my health continued firm, to translate every morning, before any other business is begun, as much as the lawyers could compile, and the writers copy, in the preceding day.” The quantity of work which Jones did in India was indeed astonishing; but he was a severe economist of time, and even his hours of recreation were rendered serviceable to the increase of knowledge. Botany especially was a favourite pursuit of his more leisure hours; and his correspondence with Banks and others shows at once the zeal with which, when duty would permit, he followed that fascinating science, and the readiness with which he communicated his own discoveries to his friends, and laboured to answer their inquiries. Nor did he neglect poetry. Several odes to Hindoo deities, originally published in the Asiatic Miscellany, will be found in his works; and these, with an elegant and cultivated fancy, display considerable power of composition. He projected a more serious undertaking,—an epic poem, of which a Phœnician colonist of Britain was to be the hero, and the Hindoo mythology was to furnish the machinery: the whole being an allegorical panegyric on the British constitution, and furnishing the character of a perfect King of England. But the extravagant fictions of the Hindoo religion have never proved permanently popular in an English dress; and there is no reason to regret that this scheme never advanced beyond its first sketch. The author made a more acceptable present to European literature in translating ‘Sacontala, or the Fatal Ring,’ a very ancient Indian drama, which contains a lively, simple, and pleasing picture of the manners of Hindustan at a remote age. It is ascribed to the first century before Christ.