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64 John Leyden d D John Leyden (1775–1811) set out to be a minister in the Church of Scotland , but his voice from the pulpit was so unpleasant, his person so unprepossessing , and his spirit of adventure so strong that he went to India instead. His Indian appointment meant that despite his divinity degrees and his years as a tutor in Scotland, Leyden needed to complete a rapid course of study for a medical license. This he accomplished in only six months, passing the examinations that allowed him to take up a position as assistant surgeon to the East India Company in Madras. Like many another Scotsman of humble background, Leyden owed his success to the willingness of the Scottish church to assist poor young men toward an education, to his native genius, and to much hard work. Leyden’s literary talents and intellectual energy led him from a poor cottage in the Scottish borders to acquaintance in the best society of Edinburgh. Growing up on a small farm in Teviotdale, Leyden was taught to read by his grandmother and attended school when opportunity permitted from the age of ten. He was tutored by a local clergyman and 0nally was able to go up to Edinburgh to study divinity. There he completed B.A. and M.A. degrees in divinity, studied much on his own, and began to write, mainly on historical and literary subjects. When a position in the church was not forthcoming, he conceived the notion of going to Africa to make his fortune, for he was a great admirer of the Scots explorer Mungo Park. His friends, however, were alarmed at the prospect; with the help of the inluential William Dundas, Leyden was appointed to a position at Madras in 1802. As Walter Scott wrote in a memoir of his fellow poet, it was understood that Leyden’s medical appointment was pro forma and that his great facility with languages would be called into service upon his arrival in India. During his years in Edinburgh, Leyden had studied Latin and Greek, as well as French, Italian, Spanish, and German. According to Scott, he was also familiar with ancient Icelandic and had studied Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. Leyden’s ambition, once he was set on a course toward India, was to equal the linguistic knowledge of Sir William Jones. Early in his service in Madras, Leyden fell ill. Despite his doctor’s orders, he used his period of recuperation to undertake a signi0cant academic project. Recommended to take a sea voyage and recover his health, he traveled to Kerala in John Leyden D 65 South India and onward to Malaysia, but instead of relaxing, he conducted research in the various places he visited. On his return, he was posted to Calcutta, publishing there in 1808 his Dissertation on the Languages and Literature of the Indo-Chinese Nations. Leyden surveyed in this work fourteen diferent languages and literatures, including those of Malaysia, Java, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Bali, and assessed the current European scholarship on these languages. As the ambition of his linguistic studies attests, Leyden threw himself fervently into all his undertakings, his passions for poetry and Scottish antiquities among them. Before his departure for India, he published a learned discourse on fairies, authored a journal of Highland travel, edited the early modern Complaynt of Scotland, and assisted Scott with The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders. Of this last undertaking, Scott recalled an instance when he and Leyden were unable to locate the whole of a ballad they especially wished to include, whereupon Leyden walked forty or 0fty miles to visit “an old person who possessed this precious remnant of antiquity.” Two days later, Scott was sitting with friends after dinner when they heard a sound like the “whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel.” It was Leyden singing in his “saw-tones” the whole of the ballad they had sought (Leyden, Poems and Ballads, 29). As Leyden’s friends predicted, his work in India was more linguistic than medical. Lord Minto appointed Leyden to judgeships in rural Bengal and then in Calcutta, following which he became assay master of the Calcutta mint. In 1811, he enthusiastically accompanied his patron to Java, where he was needed primarily for his linguistic skills. His personal object was to acquire manuscripts for his own study of languages, but Java (particularly the Dutch settlement of Batavia, which had been ceded to the British) had a...

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