The Club was an exclusive society; admission to it was eagerly sought, but not very easily obtained; election was by ballot and one black ball excluded; many eminent men, among them Gibbon, Lord Camden, Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester, Conversation Sharp, George Canning, and Samuel Rogers were temporarily or permanently refused admission, even Edmond Malone, who became its treasurer and “great Corner Stone”, had to make two or three attempts to get into it. To this society William Jones, aged 26, in the spring of 1773, was elected.

The material for this study is culled from the Epigraphia Zeylanica, and references are given to the various volumes in which the respective Inscriptions occur.

As early as 1821 Rasmus Rask identified Sinhalese as a speech belonging to the same class as Sanskrit, and added that Tamil belonged to quite a different class. Since then the subject has been studied and discussed by various scholars, and it is established beyond doubt that Sinhalese is an Indo-Aryan language. Dravidian languages have, however, had their influence on Sinhalese, chiefly through contact, and Tamil, being the language spoken by a large population in the neighbouring part of India, asserted a wide influence on the vocabulary, grammar, and literature of Sinhalese. Before examining the Dravidian loan-words in Sinhalese and the influence of Dravidian languages on its structure, the amount of the indebtedness of Sinhalese writers to Tamil authors for their subject matter will be examined here.

In 1767 Sir William “borrowed from Dr. Russel and copied the keys of the Chinese language, which he wished to learn” (Life, p. 78). In 1770 he wrote to Count Reviczki, “I succeeded in comparing one of the Odes with the version of Couplet and analysed every word, or more properly every figure in it.” Couplet's version (in Latin) had appeared about a hundred years previously. This is presumably the Ode that Sir William subsequently turned into Latin verse (Works, vol. x, p. 317). Reviczki replied (possibly with slight irony), “Pray inform me when you learned the Chinese language. I did not suspect that this was one of your accomplishments; but there are no bounds to your acquisitions as a linguist.” In 1771 Sir William writes to a friend, “I am sorry the characters you sent me are not Persian but Chinese, which I cannot decipher without a book which I have not at present.” It does not appear that after this period Sir William was ever able to devote time to Chinese linguistic studies. But in a “memorandum on objects of inquiry during my residence in Asia” which he drew up when on his way to India in 1783, he included “The Shi-King or 300 Odes”. The list was a very varied one, and also included “Britain discovered, an Heroic Poem on the Constitution of England. Model, Homer”. In 1790 he undertook to give the second Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. His subject was The Chinese. His sources dated chiefly from the end of the seventeenth century. He seems to have been unaware of the Mémoires concernant les Chinois, the bulk of which had already appeared. He told his audience (Works, vol. iii, p. 147), “Their philosophy seems yet in so rude a state as hardly to deserve the appellation,” and “of painting, sculpture, or architecture, as arts of the imagination, they seem (like other Asiatics) to have no idea”. He had probably not seen the essay, “Sur les beaux Arts de la Chine et principalement sur l'Architecture” that had appeared in Lettres d'un missionaire à Pekin, in 1782. Much of the rest of the discourse seems to be still founded on Couplet.

This article describes the manner in which the Italians dealt with the problem of an Islamic society which was bot a religious association and a political organization, the Sanusiya order of Sufis in Cyrenaica; or, rather, it describes their treatment of one of the many facets of this complex problem, the religious endowments of the order. It was a problem which very European power has had to face when it has conquered Muslim lands; the same problem which, in many different forms, the French and British have had to solve in their North African and Near Eastern possessions.