Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 07.djvu/390

 my despatch that I have mentioned Colonel Burne of the 36th regiment in a very particular manner; and I assure you that there is nothing that will give me so much satisfaction as to learn that something has been done for this old and meritorious soldier. The 86th regiment are an example to this army’ (ib. 95). Burne, in consequence, received the government of Carlisle. He remained in the Peninsula after Sir Arthur Wellesley went home, and served under Sir John Moore in the retreat to Corunna and in the battle. In 1809 Burne commanded the 36th at the capture of Flushing. and was made a colonel on the staff until the evacuation of the island. In 1811 he was made major-general, and sent out to the Peninsula. He was posted to the command of a brigade in the 6th division, with which he was present at the battle of Fuentes d’Onor. But his long service in India and the hardships of the Corunna retreat had told upon his health, and he had to return to England, where he commanded the camp at Lichfield from 1812 to 1813, and at Nottingham from 1813 to 1814. When rewards were liberally heaped on the Peninsula officers in 1814, Mayor-general Burne was completely passed over, but he was promoted lieutenant-general on 19 July 1821, and died at Berkeley Cottage, Stanmore, on 16 June 1825.

 BURNELL, ARTHUR COKE (1840–1882), a very eminent Sanskrit scholar, and a high authority on the language and literature of Southern India, was born at St. Briavels, Gloucestershire, in 1840, and was the eldest son of Arthur Burnell, of the East India Company's marine service, and grand-nephew of Sir W. Coke, chief justice of Ceylon. He was sent successively to Bedford and King‘s Colleges. At the last he met Professor Fausböll of Copenhagen, who seems to have turned towards Indian studies a mind that had early evinced a keen enjoyment of linguistic science. This taste was also stimulated by intercourse with George Borrow. In 1857 he passed the Indian civil service examination, and after a course of Sanskrit (under Goldstücker) and Telugu, in which he passed with credit at the final examination, he went to Madras in 1860. In the Malabar, Tanjore, Chingleput, Cuddapa, and Nellore districts, where he successively filled the usual subordinate offices of the civil administration, he lost no opportunity of acquiring or copying Sanskrit manuscripts, and thus formed a splendid collection. In 1868 he was compelled to return on sick leave, and travelled through Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia. While in England he published (1869) ‘Catalogue of a Collection of Sanskrit MSS. by A. C. Burnell, part i. Vedic MSS.,’ and then presented the whole (350 in number) to the India Library. Returning to India, he served successively at Mangalore and at Tanjore as judge. His greatest work is the ‘Classified Index to the Sanskrit MSS. in the Palace at Tanjore,’ printed for the Madras government in 1880. It represents an enormous amount of labour and learning, and affords a kind of conspectus of the Sanskrit literature of Southern India. ‘The mere arranging and classifying,' says Dr. Rust, ‘of such a vast number of manuscripts—most of them written on palm-leaf and in the various sets of characters used for writing Sanskrit in South India—must have been a work of untold labour, which no other Sanskrit scholar could so successfully have accomplished.'

Burnell also did for South Indian writing what Prinsep had attempted forty years before for the palaeography of the north, and his ‘Handbook of South Indian Palæography,' 1874, of which a second edition appeared in 1878, is a standard work, and deservedly won for him the honorary doctor's degree of the university of Strasburg. It opens, as Prof. Max Müller has said, ‘an avenue through one of the thickest and darkest jungles of Indian archaeology, and is so full of documentary evidence, that it will long remain indispensable to every student of Indian literature’

Among his other works (most of which were printed at Mangalore) were (1) a translation of the section on inheritance from Madhava's ‘Commentary on the Parâśarasmriti,’ 1868; (2) ‘The Law of Partition and Succession, from the manuscript Sanskrit text of Varadaraja’s Vyavaharanirnaya.’ ‘The spirited ‘preface to this work,’ says Dr. Rost, ‘shows how deeply he had grasped the very essence of Hindû law, how well versed he was in its extensive literature;' (3) The text and translation of a brief summary of Hindu law of inheritance and partition, 1875, in the preface to which he animadverted severely upon the character of the then current English manuals on Hindu law. Between 1873 and 1878 he brought out a series of five Sâmaveda-Brâhmaṇas, without translations, but with the commentary of Sâyaṇa, indices, and elaborate introductory essays of the greatest value, especially that to the Vamçabrâhmaṇa, which gives a full account of Sâyaṇa's literary life. These were followed, in 1879, by one of the Sâmaveda-Prâtiśâkhyas, also with an essay. In 1878 he published an extract, with translation, of the ‘Talavakâra,’