Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalofstrait121878roya).pdf/242

 duly received: one of them in particular is dear to me from many associations; it is from the Painting which I so often admired in the Drawing-room.

Your account of our amiable and invaluable Prince has given me the greatest satisfaction. He has indeed had his trials, but that he is himself again proves him to be of a higher being than our ordinary nalures. Volumes would not do justice to his merits or his virtues, my heart overflows which I think of him and of his sufferings, and though far removed and separated from the passing secue, be assured I listen with no common interest to all that is said of and about him.

I have told you that Lady Raffles has presented me with a son and a daughter; from the circumstance of the latter having been born on the voyage, the Javanese who are a poetic people, wished her to be named Tunjung Segâra, meaning 'Lotos of the Sea', and a more appropriate name for purity or innocence could not have been conceived. I gratified their wish, but at the same time my own, by prefixing a more Christian and a more consecrated name "Charlotte"; my son has been christened "Leopold"; and thus will "Leopold and Charlotte" be commemorated in my domestic circle, as names ever dear and ever respected; and that of my daughter will be associated with the emblem of purity, handed down in remembrance of one whose virtues and interests will never be forgotten.

I must not close this letter without giving you some account of my occupations and views as far as they are of a personal nature; I am vain enough to hope that these will interest you more than all I could write of a public or political nature.

Notwithstanding the serious demands on my time arising out of my public station, and the discussion I have naturally had with the Dutch Authorities, I have been able to advance very considerably in my collections in Natural History. Sumatra does not afford any of those interesting remains of former civilisation, and of the arts, which abound in Java. Here man is far behind-hand, perhaps a thousand years even behind his neighbour the Javanese; but we have more originality, and the great volume of Nature has hardly been opened. I was extremely unfortunate in the death of Dr. Arnold, who accompanied me as a Naturalist from England, he fell a sacrifice to his zealous and indefatigable exertions on the first journey he made into the interior; but not until