Forbes sums up an article upon this claim by saying, "We must in charity suppose that Mr. Mill really knew nothing of chess, whether Hindu, Persian, or Chinese."
Professor Wilson's opinion of Mr. Mill's work is better worth recording. "History of British India," by James Mill, Esq., fourth edition, with notes and continuation, by Horace Hayman Wilson, M.A., F.R.S., &c., London 1840, 9 vols., 8 vo., Vide Preface by Professor Wilson, page vii, &c.
Of the proofs which may be discovered in Mr. Mill's history of the operation of preconceived opinions, in confining a vigorous and active understanding to a partial and one-sided view of a great question, no instance is more remarkable than the unrelenting pertinacity with which he labours to establish the barbarism of the Hindus. Indignant at the exalted, and it may be granted, sometimes exaggerated descriptions of their advance in civilization, of their learning, their sciences, their talents, their virtues which emanated from the amiable enthusiasm of Sir William Jones, Mr. Mill has entered the lists against him with equal enthusiasm, but a less commendable purpose, and has sought to reduce them as far below their proper level as their encomiasts may have formerly elevated them above it. With very imperfect knowledge, with materials exceedingly defective, with an implicit faith in all testimony hostile to Hindu pretensions, he has elaborated a portrait of the Hindus which has no resemblance whatever to the original, and which almost outrages humanity. As he represents them, the Hindus are not only on a par with the least civilized nations of the old and new world, but they are plunged almost without exception in the lowest depths of immorality and crime. Considered merely in a literary capacity, the description of the Hindus, in the history of British India is open to censure for its obvious unfairness and injustice, but in the effect which it is likely to exercise upon the connexion between the people of England and the people of India, it is chargeable with more than literary element, its tendency is evil, it is calculated to destroy all sympathy between the rulers and the ruled.
A writer in Fraser's Magazine, observes: "The native of India is defective in that mental and moral energy, that restless enterprise, which distinguishes the Anglo Saxon genius, and which gives him such a preponderance over the impassive and contemplative Oriental, but, on the other hand, the native of India possesses in a high degree that acute perception and common sense strengthened by numerical traditions and maxims, which enable him to judge correctly of both the acts and motives of his Foreign superior. It should be recollected to their credit, that the germ of almost every known invention, the original idea of nearly every useful secret in arts, the knowledge of the highest branches of the abstract sciences, had been familiar to the wise men of the East, and were taught in the most perfect language in the world, the mother of all other languages, the Sanskrit.
The anonymous or rather unknown author of the Asiatic Society's M.S. often declares that the Hindus were far too stupid a people to have invented chess.
———
SALVIO, DOCTOR OF CIVIL LAWS
The inventor as some authors declare, and among them Jacobus de Cessolus, a Friar and Master of the Dominican Order, is Xerxes, a philosopher and minister of Ammolius, King of Babylon whose object was to admonish his monarch of the errors that had been committed in the government of the realm. This opinion is followed by many, of whom the author of the Historia del Mondo is one. St. Gregory of Nazianzen in his third oration, Cassiodorus the Great in his thirty-first epistle and eighth book, Allesandri Allesandro in the third book and twenty first chapter of his Dies Geniales, Torquato Tasso in his Romeo del Gioco, Thomas Actius in his Tractatus de Ludo Scaccherum, and other legal authors who have treated of play, say that chess owes its origin to Palamedes who at the siege of Troy, employed it in order that his soldiers should not remain inactive, and not being able to practice actual warfare, they might amuse themselves with mimic conflicts. For which reason Palamedes played it with Thersites, as Homer tells us in the second book of the Iliad, so also did the other heroes of the Grecian armies, as is related by Euripides in his tragedies.
Carrera 1617, published a large volume concerning the origin
of chess, in which he attempts to prove from Herodotus,
Euripides, Sophocles, Philostratus, Homer, Virgil, Aristotle,
Seneca, Plato, Ovid, Horace, Quintilian, and Martial Vida, that
Palamedes invented chess at the siege of Troy.
The Encyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, dedicated to the King in 1727, contains an account of chess, but it is neither a well informed nor useful article beyond the statement that Schach is originally Persian, and that Schachmat in that language, signifies the king is dead, it vouchsafes neither reasonable nor useful information.