from 1895 until his death in 1900. On 13 March 1889 Philip Lyttelton Gell the then Secretary to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, wrote to Hunter about Gell arranged the publication of the series by June 1889; with Hunter receiving £75 for each volume, and the author £25. Gell's experience of the earlier unsaleable Sacred Books of the East and financial constraints forced the Rulers of India to end at 28 volumes in spite of Hunter's disappointment about the same. Hunter himself contributed the volumes on Dalhousie (1890) and Mayo (1891) to the series. He had previously written an official Life of Lord Mayo, which was published on 19 November 1875 in two volumes with a second edition appearing in 1876. He also wrote a weekly article on Indian affairs for The Times. But the great task to which he applied himself on his settlement in England was a history upon a large scale of the British Dominion in India, two volumes of which only had appeared when he died, carrying the reader barely down to 1700. He was much hindered by the confused state of his materials, a portion of which he arranged and published in 1894 as Bengal Manuscript Records, in three volumes. Hunter dedicated his 1892 work Bombay 1885 to 1890: A Study in Indian Administration to Florence Nightingale. His later works include the novel titled The Old Missionary (1895, described on the title-page as "revised from The Contemporary Review"), and The Thackerays in India (1897). John F. Riddick describes Hunter's The Old Missionary as one of the "three significant works" produced by Anglo-Indian writers on Indian missionaries along with The Hosts of the Lord (1900) by Flora Annie Steel and Idolatry (1909) by Alice Perrin. In the winter of 1898–1899, in consequence of the fatigue incurred in a journey to the Caspian and back, on a visit to the sick-bed of one of his two sons, Hunter was stricken down by a severe attack of influenza, which affected his heart. He died at Oaken Holt on 6 February 1900. S. C. Mittal believes that Hunter "represented the official mind of the bureaucratic Victorian historians in India", of whom James Talboys Wheeler and Alfred Comyn Lyall were other examples. Bibliography Works (20 volumes) (2 volumes) (3rd ed. 26 vols; 1st ed. 9 vols, 1881; 2nd ed. 14 vols, 1885–87) Works about Hunter See also The Imperial