Note 1 — Chapter I

: REINAUD, Mémoire sur l' Inde, p. 3.

2: GEORGE TURNOUR was the eldest son of the Hon. George Turnour, son of the first Earl of Winterton; his mother being Emilie, niece to the Cardinal Due de Beausset. He was born in Ceylon in 1799 and having been educated in England under the guardianship of the Right Hon. Sir Thomas Maitland, then governor of the island, he entered the Civil Service in 1818, in which he rose to the highest rank. He was distinguished equally by his abilities and his modest display of them. Interpreting in its largest sense the duty enjoined on him, as a public officer, of acquiring a knowledge of the native languages, he extended his studies, from the vernacular and written Singhalese to Pali, the great root and original of both, known only to the Buddhist priesthood, and imperfectly and even rarely amongst them. No dictionaries then existed to assist in defining the meaning of Pali terms which no teacher could be found capable of rendering into English, so that Mr. Turnour was entirely dependent on his knowledge of Singhalese as a medium for translating them. To an ordinary mind such obstructions would have proved insurmountable, aggravated as they were by discouragements arising from the assumed barrenness of the field, and the absence of all sympathy with his pursuits, on the part of those around him, who reserved their applause and encouragement till success had rendered him indifferent to either. To this apathy of the government officers, Major Forbes, who was then the resident at Matelle, formed an honourable exception; and his narrative of Eleven Years in Ceylon shows with what ardour and success he shared the tastes and cultivated the studies to which he had been directed by the genius and example of Turnour. So zealous and unobtrusive were the pursuits of the latter, that even his immediate connexions and relatives were unaware of the value and extent of his acquirements till apprised of their importance and profundity by the acclamation with which his discoveries and translations from the Pali were received by the savans of Europe. Major Forbes, in a private letter, which I have been permitted to see, speaking of the difficulty of doing justice to the literary character of Turnour, and the ability, energy, and perseverance which he exhibited in his historical investigations, says, "his Epitome of the History of Ceylon was from the first correct; I saw it seven years before it was published, and it scarcely required an alteration afterwards." Whilst engaged in his translation of the Mahawanso, TURNOUR, amongst other able papers on Buddist History and Indian Chronology in the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society, v. 521, vi. 299, 790, 1049, contributed a series of essays on the Pali-Buddhistical Annals, which were published in 1836, 1837, 1838.—Journ. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, vi. 501, 714, vii. 686, 789, 919. At various times he published in the same journal an account of the Tooth Relic of Ceylon, Ib. vi. 856, and notes on the inscriptions on the columns of Delhi, Allahabad, and Betiah, &c. &c.; and frequent notices of Ceylon coins and inscriptions. He had likewise planned another undertaking of signal importance, the translation into English of a Pali version of the Buddhist scriptures, an ancient copy of which he had discovered, unencumbered by the ignorant commentaries of later writers, and the fables with which they have defaced the plain and simple doctrines of the early faith. He announced his intention in the Introduction to the Mahawanso to expedite the publication, as "the least tardy means of effecting a comparison of the Pali with the Sanskrit version" (p. cx.). His correspondence with Prinsep, which I have been permitted by his family to inspect, abounds with the evidence of inchoate inquiries in which their congenial spirits had a common interest, but which were abruptly ended by the premature decease of both. Turnour, with shattered health, returned to Europe in 1842, and died at Naples on the 10th of April in the following year, The first volume of his translation of the Mahawanso, which contains thirty-eight chapters out of the hundred which form the original work, was published at Colombo in 1837; and apprehensive that scepticism might assail the authenticity of a discovery so important, he accompanied his English version with a reprint of the original Pali in Roman characters with diacritical points.

He did not live to conclude the task he had so nobly begun; he died while engaged on the second volume of his translation, and only a few chapters, executed with his characteristic accuracy, remain in manuscript in the possession of his surviving relatives. It diminishes, though in a slight degree, our regret for the interruption of his literary labours to know that the section of the Mahawanso which he left unfinished is inferior both in authority and value to the earlier portion of the work, and that being composed at a period when literature was at its lowest ebb in Ceylon, it differs little if at all from other chronicles written during the decline of the native dynasty.