Excerpt from The Tamil Plutarch: Containing a Summary Account of the Lives of the Poets and Poetesses of Southern India and Ceylon It had long been my intention to offer to the public an account of the Lives of our Poets, butthe difiiculties which presented themselves in procuring materials for the work owing to the absence of biographic al records in Tamil either ancient or modern, was more than I had calculated upon, and I almost resolved to give up the undertaking in despair. Finding however that the traditions current among the people, carefully collected and scrupulously detached from fictitious and ornamental additions such as 'oriental imagination delights in, would afford the desired information, fl was induced to direct myat tention to that'source of knowledge, and the result with all its imper fections is now before the public. 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.