[Robert Spence]. English author, born at Preston, England, on the 1st of July 1803; was ordained a Wesleyan minister (1825); spent twenty-three years in Ceylon as a missionary, where he was one of the earliest students of Buddhism and considered the best scholar of his day in the Pali language. He returned to England in 1848. He wrote The British Government and the Idolatry of Ceylon (1841); Eastern Monachism (1850); A Manual of Buddhism in its Modern Developments (translated from Singhalese MSS., 1853); Legends and Theories of the Buddhists Compared with History and Science (1867). He died at Headingly, Yorkshire, on the 16th of April 1868.
