Page:Narrative of a journey through the upper provinces of India etc. (Volume III.).djvu/402

360 rity of the school were toiling at Sanskrit grammar. And yet the day before, in the same holy city, I had visited another college, founded lately by a wealthy Hindu banker, and entrusted by him to the management of the Church Missionary Society, in which, besides a grammatical knowledge of the Hindusthanee language, as well as Persian and Arabic, the senior boys could pass a good examination in English grammar, in,  Scientific Dialogues, the use of the globes, and the principal facts and moral precepts of the Gospel, most of them writing beautifully in the Persian and very tolerably in the English character, and excelling most boys I have met with in the accuracy and readiness of their arithmetic. The English officer who is now in charge of the Benares Vidalaya is a clever and candid young man, and under him I look forward to much improvement. . . . . ., a learned native, who has sometimes been called, though I fear without reason, a Christian, remonstrated against this system last year in a paper which he sent me to be put into Lord hands, and which, for its good English, good sense, and forcible arguments, is a real curiosity, as coming from an Asiatic. I have not since been in Calcutta, and know not whether any improvement has occurred in consequence; but from the unbounded attachment to Sanskrit literature displayed by some of those who chiefly manage those affairs, I have no great expectation of the kind. Of the value of the acquirements which so much is sacrificed to