In the first issue of our Bulletin the Director was good enough to allow me to insert a very diffident and tentative attempt to record the characteristic sounds of Bengali in the script of the International Phonetic Association, and to reduce them to some sort of rule for the benefit of students. Writing at a long distance of time and space from Bengal, I was not so rash as to suppose that my assertions were beyond question. On the contrary, I hoped and wished to provoke discussion on a subject which has only recently become the subject of serious study. I was not surprised, therefore, when a valued colleague (not himself a Bengali) told me that some Bengali friends of his were convinced that my attempt was a failure and my statements incorrect. This criticism, however, was not of much help to me, since it did not give details.

In the following pages is presented a translation of a passage from Shaḍakshari Dēvar's famous Kanarese poem Śabaraśaṅkara-vilāsa. Some of the more tedious passages I have omitted; enough remains to show how the pious Śaiva conceives his Paradise. Certainly Shaḍakshari's visions of heaven are very unlike those of Dante and Milton. But they have much value as documents both of religion and of poetry.

Dr. John Steele has very kindly sent me some criticisms on the Notes which I contributed to the first number of the Bulletin, and I propose to deal with these before proceeding-further.

Readers of the Arabian Nights, The Assemblies of El Hariri, and contemporaneous Oriental literature of a similar stamp, become familiar with a type of humanity characteristic of the locality and epoch in which those romances of Eastern life are laid. This characteristic type is a combination of merchant and divine, who is a great traveller and purveyor of news. He is always dignified, a gossip and a busybody in a gentlemanly way, and distinguished no less for his punctilious performance of all the external observances of the creed of Islam than for his assiduity in his commercial operations. To my mind residence in the country occupied by the Hausa people cannot fail to prompt the thought that between this typical personality and the average man of Hausaland there is a striking kinship in character, if not in race.

[The following pages form a portion of what has been written by me for the section of the Grundriss der Indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde, dealing with the Indo-Aryan Vernaculars. The work was not completed when the War broke out, and as there is no immediate prospect of their publication as originally intended, I gladly accept Sir Denison Ross's suggestion, and offer them as they stand for preliminary publication in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies.]

It appears from those who have written the history of Russia that neither native nor European authorities know anything about it before the latter half of the ninth century, and that the tenth century is nearing its end before anything like firm ground is reached. Their name is by this time quite familiar to the Arabic chroniclers, and Ibn al-Athir even takes the trouble to record the commencement of the conversion of the Russians to Christianity; according to him in the year 375, i.e. 985–6 a.d., the Byzantine emperors being besieged found it necessary to invoke the aid of the king of the Russians, and offered him their sister in marriage. She declined to marry one who was not of her religion, whence this Russian king adopted Christianity, and that was how the religion began to be propagated in his country. The date of the first conversion of a Russian king given by Morfill on the authority of a Russian chronicle is within two years of that assigned by Ibn al-Athir; the former 988, the latter apparently 986; and Ibn al-Athir is here following a contemporary record. The name Rūs, i.e. Russians, was already familiar to Ibn al-Athir's readers and indeed those of the authority whom he excerpts owing to their being mentioned by the popular poet Mutanabbi in his most celebrated poem, describing the victory won by the Hamdanide Saif al-daulah in 954 over a force mustered by the Byzantine general called the Domesticus, wherein according to the poet so many tribes and tongues were represented that a staff of interpreters was required.

In 170 Chinese Poems I have given an account of Po Chü-i's life and translations of over sixty of his poems.

Here are twenty-two further poems, of which all but one are now translated for the first time. The exception is No. 19, of which Pfizmaier gives a very inaccurate version in Denkschr. d. K. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Wien, xxxvi (1888), p. 239.

Swahili stands alone among the Bantu languages in possessing a literature, which originated before the people came in contact with Europeans and has probably been in existence for several centuries. The Arabs, who settled on the east coast of Africa from the seventh century onwards, brought with them their alphabet and their prosody; and their descendants who, intermarrying with the daughters of the land, evolved the Swahili language, have preserved both to this day, though not without modifications. The use of the Arabic alphabet to express Swahili sounds involves considerable difficulties, and though some of these have been surmounted by expedients similar to those adopted in writing Turkish, Persian, Malay, etc., the reading even of an ordinary letter is by no means always a simple matter.