The light of Asia

By Sir Edwin Arnold

A New Edition with illustrations by Hamzeh Carr

Introduction by Sir E. Denison Ross

London: John Lane the Bodley Head LTD
New York Dodd, Mead & Company

This edition is limited to three thousand numbered copies for sale in England and America, of which this is No. 924.

ex-libris on endpaper

INTRODUCTION
By Sir E. Denison Ross, C.I.E.

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, the author of this work, was born at Gravesend in 1832. He was educated at King's School, Rochester, King's College, London, and University College, Oxford. In 1852 he took the Newdigate prize at Oxford, and in 1856 was appointed Principal of the Deccan College, Poema. In 1861 he became leader writer of the Daily Telegraph, and in 1873 chief editor. While holding this latter position he was responsible for the setting on foot of several missions, including that of H. M. Stanley in search of Livingstone. He died in 1904. He was a fine journalist, but it was as a poet that he desired recognition, and so great was his ambition in this direction that he is said to have expected that the Poet-Laureateship would revert to him on the death of Lord Tennyson in 1892, and this, in spite of the fact that since publishing The Light of Asia in 1879 he had produced nothing that was noteworthy in verse except The Light of the World, which fell altogether flat.
That The Light of Asia, with its unfamiliar setting, its strange names and its Sanskrit terminology should have met with an immediate success, is proof enough that the story was well told and that the poem had incontestable merit. The moral doctrines of the Buddha were those familiar to the West, but the Indian scenery and imagery were new to many, while the actuallife of Gautama presented ................................................................