Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 4.djvu/23

Rh Eighteen years later, a countryman of Hyde, George Boucher, received from the Parsis in Surat a copy of the Vendîdâd Sâda, which was brought to England in 1723 by Richard Cobbe. But the old manuscript was a sealed book, and the most that could then be made of it was to hang it by an iron chain to the wall of the Bodleian Library, as a curiosity to be shown to foreigners. A few years later, a Scotchman, named Eraser, went to Surat, with the view of obtaining from the Parsis, not only their books, but also a knowledge of their contents. He was not very successful in the first undertaking, and utterly failed in the second.

In 1754 a young man, twenty years old, Anquetil Duperron, a scholar of the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, happened to see a facsimile of four leaves of the Oxford Vendîdâd, which had been sent from England, a few years before, to Etienne Fourmont, the Orientalist. He determined at once to give to France both the books of Zoroaster and the first European translation of them. Too impatient to set off, to wait for a mission from the government which had been promised to him, he enlisted as a private soldier in the service of the French East India Company; he embarked at Lorient on the 24th of February, 1755, and after three years of endless adventures and dangers through the whole breadth of Hindustan, at the very time when war was waging between France and England, he arrived at last in Surat, where he stayed among the Parsis for three years more. Here began another struggle, not less hard, but more decisive, against the same mistrust and ill-will which had disheartened Eraser; but he came out of it victorious, and prevailed at last on the Parsis to part both with their books and their knowledge. He came back to Paris on the 14th of March, 1764, and deposited on the following day at the Bibliothèque Royale the whole of the Zend-Avesta and copies of several