8vo, (208 x 125 mm). (8), 192 pp. With 4 folding charts. Contemporary speckled calf, spine restored to style and laid down, with title in gilt. Scattered ex-libris stamps; a few minor pencil notes. In excellent condition.

Joseph Beschi (1680-1746) was a Jesuit missionary in India who arrived in 1710 and joined the Madurai Mission a year later. As was a common approach of Jesuit missionaries, who felt that acculturation helped to gain them followers, he immersed himself in local life and dressed as a Hindu ascetic. Beschi gained remarkable proficiency in Tamil and authored several works in the language, including "Tembavani", an epic poem on the life of St Joseph.

Beschi was the first European to compile a grammar of the colloquial form of Tamil, "kotuntamil", which earned him the title among his European contemporaries as the "Father of Tamil prose". Not everyone was in agreement, however: Benjamin Babington, whose translation of Beschi's grammar of high Tamil was published at Madras in 1822, scathingly asserted that "the English version of Beschi's low Tamil grammar" was "so badly executed as to be, in some parts, scarcely intelligible", but was forced to concede that while Latin editions were to be had readily and cheaply, English students of Tamil were only to be seen with Horst's translation. That Horst was a Lutheran missionary may have been a further spur to Babington's criticism.

Vater/Jülg 513 & cf. 240. B. Babington, "Translator's Preface", in: A Grammar of the High Dialect of the Tamil Language, Termed Shen-Tamil (Madras, 1822), p. III.

Provenance: early ownership inscription of Charles A. Forbes to front free endpaper; bookplate of Glasgow Public Libraries, with withdrawal stamp.