The subject is interesting, and I do not doubt from the specimen which I saw that you would treat it in a fresh and agreeable way.  What we need in Europe is to have the reality, the actual working of these Indian institutions which we have so often mentioned brought home to us, and 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. Ramakrishna Pillai has produced a work in English—­“Village Life in India”—­that has won the praise of Sir Grant Duff.—­Professor Satthianadhan’s Lecture on Intellectual Results in India.

Mr. Ramakrishna takes a typical village in the Madras Presidency, “the most Indian part of India,” and shows us in half a dozen lucid chapters that the wants of the villagers are all material—­wells, roads, better breeds of cattle, and so on—­and that they do not, and will not for a long time, care one cash for anything which happens, or which might be made to happen, in the great outer world beyond their palm-groves and rice-fields.  There is nothing political in this pleasant little book, we are pleased to say, although we have drawn this political moral from it.  It is a truthfully written account of native life in one of those 55,000 villages which dot the great district—­a tract much larger than the British Isles—­the daily existence of whose peaceful, and not altogether unhappy, population it is intended to illustrate; and it can be dipped into, or read through, with equal satisfaction and advantage,—­Daily Telegraph (London).