After almost three years of the closest application to study, Mr. Judson was taken ill. He wrote to Dr. Baldwin:
“I began to enter into my studies with such pleasure and spirit, and to make such rapid progress, as encouraged me to hope that the time was not far distant when I should be able to commence missionary operations. I was going forward in a course of most valuable Burman reading, and, at the same time, had begun to translate one of the Gospels, and to write a ‘View of the Christian Religion’ in Burman, which, in imagination, were already finished and circulating among the natives, when, all of a sudden, in the midst of the hot season, which in this country is most severe during the months of March and April, I was seized with a distressing weakness and pain in my eyes and head, which put a stop to all my delightful pursuits, and reduced me to a pitiable state indeed. Since that time, excepting at some intervals, I have been unable to read, or write, or make any exertion whatever. Sometimes I have almost given up the hope that I should ever be of any more service; sometimes I have been on the point of trying a short voyage at sea. But, thanks be to God, it is now ten days since I have experienced a turn of severe pain, though I still feel great weakness in my head, and, indeed, throughout my whole nervous system. I begin now to hope that I shall gradually recover, though I fear I never shall be as I formerly was.”
He improved even the hours of his illness by collecting what knowledge he had acquired of the language and “putting it together in the shape of a grammar that it might not be wholly lost to others.” Fearing that his own life might soon come to a close, he determined to _blaze_ the trees through this hitherto untrodden wilderness of the Burmese language, by preparing a grammar. On July 13, 1816, exactly three years to a day after his arrival, he completed a work with the modest title, “Grammatical Notices of the Burman Language.” It was printed twenty years afterward; and although it was the result of a study of only three years, of one of the most difficult Oriental languages, and was written to relieve the tedium of a sick-bed, yet its merits were such as to command the following notice in the _Calcutta Review_:
“He (Dr. Judson) published another work, a grammar of no pretensions, and of very small dimensions, yet a manual which indicated the genius of the man, perhaps, more strikingly than anything else, except his Bible. He has managed, from a thorough knowledge of the language, to condense into a few short pages (only seventy-six) a most complete grammar of this difficult tongue; and, as the student grows in knowledge, _pari passu_, this little volume rises in his estimation; for its lucid, comprehensive conciseness becomes more and more manifest. In our limited acquaintance with languages, whether of the East or West, we have seen no work in any tongue which we should compare with it for brevity and completeness; yet we have, in our day, had to study and wade through some long and some would-be short grammars.”
Partially recovering from his illness, Mr. Judson completed, on July 30, 1816, his first tract, entitled “A View of the Christian Religion, in three parts, Historic, Didactic, and Preceptive.”[21]
The next step was to multiply this tract and speed it on its way among the Burmans. A press and Burman types had already arrived—a valuable present from the English Baptist brethren of Serampore. A missionary printer, the Rev. Geo. H. Hough, and his wife, were already on their way from America. Mr. Rice was still arousing the Baptists in the United States to send on reinforcements of men and money.
Mr. Judson wrote again and again appealing for help.