Department—being spread throughout India, with as great a success as Indo-Greek art in the days of Asoka, or the Hindu-Saracenic art in the reign of Akbar. The author of Mathurá is a man of taste as well as of learning, and has in consequence produced a memoir which will not merely serve as a, reference with regard to the district it describes, but is of historical, archeological, ethnological, philological, and artistic information besides."—Lahore Givil and Military Gazette.
"Mr. F. S. Growse has published a second edition of his Mathurá: a District Memoir, the first edition of which we noticed in this paper when the work first appeared in 1874. The author is well known not only as a scholar and archeologist, but by the great service he has done in rescuing from utter ruin and oblivion many of the interesting remnants of native art and architecture with which the Mathurá district—the classic land of the Hindu—abounds. Of his labours in this direction we have already spoken at some length in Vol. IX. of the Indo-European Correspondence (pp. 180 and 148), in our notice of the first edition of Mr. Growse’s work. Since it first appeared the author has, we regret to say, been transferred from Mathurá, where he was Magistrate and Collector, to Bulandshahr. During the three years' interval between the first appearance of his Memoir and his removal to another station he had added largely to his stock of local information, and being, as he tells us, unwilling that the fruit of his labour should be lost, he asked and obtained the sanction of Government for the issue of a second edition from the Allahabad press. The work now appears much enlarged and enriched—among other things—by upwards of thirty handsome illustrations.
"One of Mr. Growse’s acts while he was at Mathurá was the erection of a Catholic chapel, a work which it can hardly be contested is valuable if only as an experiment of a very sound principle—namely, the utilising of native art to form an appropriate and characteristic style of Christian architecture in India, The Mathurá chapel, Mr. Growse says, is intended as 'a protest against the 'standard plans and other stereotyped conventionalities;' of the Public Works Department; but it soems to us to be, at all events, implicitly a protest as well against the unfortunate tendency there is among Europeans in India to Europeanize whatever falls under the influence of Christianity. We call this tendency unfortunate, because it not only unnecessarily widens the already wide chasm between Christianity and paganism; not only because it practically ignores the existence of native art as if it were an essentially unholy barbarism, but because the tendency aims at what is really impracticable.
"Mr. Growse’s lines had fallen on a nursery of Hindu art which survives in Mathurá to the present day. That art, though pagan, contains much that is really great and noble in conception and in workmanship, and he has essayed to show how it may be made the handmaid of Christian gothic art in the construction of the Mathurá chapel. The photograph of the interior, though it represents the building
3a
