Note 114 — PART II.

Anquetil composed a number of Memoirs, read to the French Institut and preserved in their printed records. He published, in 1771, three quarto volumes upon his voyages to, in, and from India, and the Works of Zoroaster; in 1798, L’Inde en rapport avec l’Europe; in 1799, La Legislation orientale, ou le despotisme considéré dans la Turquie, la Perse et l’Indostane. An epistle which he placed before his Latin translation of Dara Shuko’s Persian Upanishad, and addressed to the Brahmans of India, contained, as it were, his religious and political testament. He declares his nourishment to have been reduced, like that of an abstemious ascetic, living, even in winter, without fire; and sleeping in a bed without feathers or sheets. His juvenile boast of “personal beauty” was expiated by total neglect of his body, left “with linen unchanged and unwashed;” his aspirations to “a vast extent of learning” had subsided into patient and most persevering studies. But, disdaining to accept gifts and pensions, even from government, he preserved his absolute liberty, and blessed his poverty, “as the salvation of his soul and body, the rampart of morality and of religion; a friend of all men; victorious over the allurements of the world” he tended towards the Supreme Being. Well may virtues so rare efface other human failings of Anquetil du Perron. He died, in his seventy-fourth year, in 1805.—(See Histoire et Mémoires de l’Institut royal de France. Classe d’Histoire et de Littérature anciennes, tome III. 1818.)