“The Burmans are a slow, wary, circumspect race; but their pertinacity in maintaining an opinion deliberately adopted, will bear, I imagine, due proportion to their tardiness in adopting it. This trait in their character will render missionary operations among them less rapid in the outset, but more effective and permanent in the issue.” Another great difficulty at the beginning was _learning the language_ without grammar, or dictionary, or an English-speaking teacher. How hard a task this was, may be learned from his letters. _To the Rev. Dr. Bolles._ “RANGOON, _January_ 16, 1816. “Yours of March, 1815, I lately received, and read with real satisfaction. Neither brother Rice nor any of the others you mention have yet been heard of in these parts. May they not be far distant. Whenever they shall arrive, I hope to be of some real service to them in their preparatory studies, and to be able to give them, in a short time, information on many points which it has cost me months to acquire. I just now begin to see my way forward in this language, and hope that two or three years more will make it somewhat familiar; but I have met with difficulties that I had no idea of before I entered on the work. For a European or American to acquire a _living_ Oriental language, root and branch, and make it his own, is quite a different thing from his acquiring a cognate language of the West, or any of the dead languages, as they are studied in the schools. One circumstance may serve to illustrate this. I once had occasion to devote about two months to the study of the French. I have now been above two years engaged on the Burman; but if I were to choose between a Burman and French book to be examined in, without previous study, I should, without the least hesitation, choose the French. When we take up a Western language, the similarity of the characters, in very many terms, in many modes of expression, and in the general structure of sentences, its being in fair print (a circumstance we hardly think of), and the assistance of grammars, dictionaries, and instructors, render the work comparatively easy. But when we take up a language spoken by a people on the other side of the earth, whose very thoughts run in channels diverse from ours, and whose modes of expression are consequently all new and uncouth; when we find the letters and words all totally destitute of the least resemblance to any language we had ever met with, and these words not fairly divided and distinguished, as in Western writing, by breaks, and points, and capitals, but run together in one continuous line, a sentence or paragraph seeming to the eye but one long word; when, instead of clear characters on paper, we find only obscure scratches on dried palm leaves strung together and called a book; when we have no dictionary, and no interpreter to