Excerpt from The Ocean of Story, Vol. 2 of 10: Being C. H. Tawney's Translation of Katha Sarit Katha (or Ocean of Streams of Story), Now Edited With Introduction, Fresh, Explanatory Notes and Terminal Essay It is a source of great pleasure to me that, by being invited to write the Foreword to this volume, I have been given an opportunity of paying tribute to the memory of an old friend and a great scholar. If, here, I confine myself to the latter aspect of his character, it is at the same time impossible to abstain from associating with it recollections of a cordial friendship extending over more than forty years. It was in Calcutta, in 1880, that I first met Charles Henry Tawney, who was then Principal of the Sanskrit College and had already achieved a high reputation for Sanskrit learning. A warm friendship, fostered on both sides by similarity of tastes, and on my part by his ever-ready kindness and help, then sprang up, and continued unchecked from that time till his lamented death two years ago in Camberley. A master of the Sanskrit language, and widely read in other branches of knowledge, he was an ideal translator of Somadeva's famous work, into the spirit of which he readily allowed himself to enter. The Attic salt of his fancy - a perpetual source of joy to those who were intimate with him - enabled him to reproduce the dry humour of the Sanskrit author in a sympathetic phraseology that few could equal. Whether it was such sophisms as those with which Yaugandharayana won over the simple straightforward soldier, Rumanvat, or such mock solemnity as that with which he tells the exploits of the two scapegrace rogues, Siva and Madhava, in this translation we seem to hear the original author's very voice. But it was not only as a capable translator that Tawney shone. A remarkably wide range of reading enabled him to adorn his work with numerous parallels taken from the legends of other countries, and that at a time when little had been done in the scientific examination of folk-lore. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.