Sir William Jones

Sir William Jones (1746–1794) was a British orientalist and judge in Calcutta, founder of the Asiatic Society (1784), who first proposed the kinship of Sanskrit with Greek, Latin and the other Indo-European languages. He wrote English verse as well as translations from Persian and Sanskrit.

The poem here is the one printed under his name in Frederick Locker's Lyra Elegantiarum (London: E. Moxon, 1867), an anthology of vers de société and vers d'occasion by deceased authors; the texts follow that first edition.