probably such a writer as yourself may do this better than a European
could do.--_The Right Hon. James Bryce, D.C.L_.

Ramakrishna,--a literary gentleman belonging to Madras, who has written
a charming book called "Life in an Indian Village."--_Professor Eric
Robertson in Macmillan's series of Orient Readers_.

I can name more than a dozen Indian authors whose works can fairly rank
with some of the best productions of Englishmen. The well-known author
of "Maxima and Minima," viz., the late Professor Ramachundra, was
considered by no other than De Morgan, the famous mathematician, as an
original genius of a remarkable order. A celebrated Cambridge
Mathematician once told me that he set a problem for the Mathematical
Tripos, basing it upon Ramachundra's "Maxima and Minima," and with the
exception of a few that headed the list, none were able to solve the
problem. In the late Toru Dutt, a young Bengali native Christian lady,
some of the leading literary men of England found a poet of no mean
powers. Mr. Edmund Gosse writes as follows in the preface to her poems
that have been published by an English firm: "It is difficult to
estimate what we have lost in the premature death of Toru Dutt.
Literature has no honours which need have been beyond the grasp of a
girl who, at the age of twenty-one, and in languages separated from her
own by so deep a chasm, had produced so much of lasting worth.... When
the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there
is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of
song." Dr. Bandarkar of Bombay is considered to be one of the best
Orientalists of the day. A number of Bengali gentlemen have earned a
lasting fame by literary productions in English, among whom I may
mention the Rev. Lal Behari Day, late Professor in the Hooghly College,
and Mr. Dutt of the Bengal Civil Service. In our own Presidency Mr.