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Music, painting, medicine, astronomy, are all represented in the ancient literature of India, and although there is no time here to dwell on the progress in, and knowledge of, these arts displayed in those days, yet that knowledge was by no means small.

Hitherto, except for the Prakrits used in the drama and the sacred Pali of the Buddhist books, the language used in the literature was the classical Sanskrit, and the literature itself centred round the lands into which the Brahman culture and civilisation had spread, and their schools had been formed.

The spoken vernaculars of India, those of the north evolved from Sanskrit, and known as Aryan, those in the south being purely aboriginal or Dravidian, a branch of the Ural Attaic family of languages, had to be considered, and the literature produced in them found its fitting place in the advancement of civilisation.

Jainism, an ancient religion probably pre-Buddhistic, which has in this article escaped attention owing to its many similarities to Buddhism, and whose literature has still to be unfolded to the West, penetrated early into South India, and to its influence is owing the Naladiyar, the Bible, as it is called, of the Tamil language. The work is attributed to a Jaina monk, and consists of 400 quatrains of moral and didactic sayings, perfectly irrelevant to one another, but instinct with quick perception of the varied phases of life and thought. The subjects are virtue, wealth, and pleasure. The aphorisms are some of the best produced in any literature, as well as melodious and poetical. Another Tamil work on the same subject is the Kurral of a low-caste weaver, Tiruvalluvar.

As in South India the contact between the Aryan and Dravidian roused a new outburst of song, so the Mohamedan conquest of the north had its effect.

The standard work of the north is the Ramayana

of Tulsi Das, a poet who sang in the vernacular of North India in the reign of the Emperor Akbar. His Ramayana is loved by the people of Hindustan above even the Vedas, Upanishads, and Puranas. The poem is founded on the old epic story of the Ramayana, but in it Rama is worshipped as Vishnu, the Supreme Being, through union with whom the soul can alone find peace and rest. The sentiment is pure, and the diction, though it does not possess the smoothness of the polished classical Sanskrit, is very striking.

The prosperous reign of Akbar (1556-1605), marked by his religious toleration and encouragement of learning, gave an impetus to the arts, and literature flourished under his protection. The wars and internecine strife that succeeded the dissolution of the Mughal empire gave no encouragement to the poet or prose author, and it was not until the English rule was firmly established through the vast continent that peace and quiet were sufficiently restored for the minds of the wise and learned to turn once more to what is essentially an Indian phase of mind, deep thought over the problems of life, united to an earnest effort to find some solution for its perplexing questions.

India during the last hundred years has been passing through a period of unrest, both religious and social, which has had, and will still continue to have, a deep and permanent effect.

CEYLON

BY L. B. CLARENCE

CEYLON is called England's principal Crown colony. It is not a "colony" in the strict sense of the word, for colony" properly means a body of immigrants settled in a foreign country, and the English colonists are but a very small fraction of the inhabitants of Ceylon. The island is not a dependency of our country in which Englishmen can settle permanently, as in Australia, for instance, or Canada. The tropical climate forbids that. In Ceylon, as in India, the European immigrants must always be greatly outnumbered by the sons of the soil. The dependency is called a "colony," because it is governed through the Colonial Office, and a "Crown" colony, because it is administered directly under the Crown, and has no responsible representative government of its own.

It is an important possession to us in many ways. First, there is its situation-close to India, and right in the track of the Eastern steamer traffic. The port of Colombo has become a sort of marine Clapham Junction, whence the traffic branches to all parts of the world. More than 7,000,000 tons of shipping clear there annually, and over 30,000 passengers pass through. Moreover, under our rule the island has developed a great import and export trade. It takes about £1,500,000 worth of our goods, and in return sends us about £2,750,000 worth of its own produce -coco-nut oil and fibre, cinnamon, plumbago, cacao

The original Lecture was delivered in November 1896.

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(you know that cacao has nothing to do with the palm that yields the coco-nuts), and many other commodities, particularly tea.

In Ceylon, as in India, the European inhabitants, by reason of the climate, can never be more than a drop in the bucket compared with the natives. The Europeans (not counting the military) number scarcely 6000, as against something like 3,000,000 natives. And so we are responsible for the welfare of a large native population living under our rule, and entirely dependent on us for good government and adminis

tration.

Ceylon is often coupled with India. A man returned from Ceylon to England is asked about his life "in India," as though Ceylon and India must be all the same. This is not unnatural. Ceylon has much in common, at any rate, with Southern India. Its inhabitants are of Indian origin. Their ancestors came from India long ago. And yet, from one cause and another, the atmosphere of life and government and administration differs perceptibly in the two countries.

We can hardly compare Ceylon with India, because the one is so little and the other so very large. British India, from Kashmir to Cape Comorin, from Bombay to Burma, embraces wide variations of climate and widely differing peoples. What a difference between the icy peaks and glaciers of the Himalayas and the burning plains of Southern India, and what a difference, again, between the peoples who live in the north and the south, the east and the west, of that vast empire, speaking among them about eighty different languages.

Ceylon has scarcely one-hundredth part of the Indian population, and only two native languages. There are no warlike races there-none like the Sikhs and Gurkhas, who once fought bravely against us, and now furnish us with soldiers who, with equal gallantry, fight shoulder to shoulder with our own Tommy Atkins.

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