GENERAL VIEW OF ANCIENT LITERATURE.

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yielded to her fate, wasting her time in empty philosophical discussions and the pursuit of pleasure. Poetry languished, yet flashed out occasionally in epic or didactic form, bringing to mind the glories of the past. It is true that in the idyls of Theocritus (little pictures of domestic life) pastoral verse now bloomed for the first time on European soil, and with fine effect; but it was in far-off Syracuse, not in classic Greece. Here the deepening twilight was fatal to literary growth; and when Egypt fell beneath the power of Rome in the first century B.C., Greek letters sought a new asylum in the city of Romulus.

Turning to Rome, we find that she had long displayed an appreciation of Grecian genius as well as a striking talent for imitation. About the middle of the third century B.C., with little or no literature of her own, she gladly appropriated the foreign treasures held up before her admiring eyes by Liv'ius Androni'cus, a Tarentine Greek, whom the fortunes of war had made the slave of a Roman master. This most ancient of Latin poets put upon the stage versions of the Greek dramas, and with his translation of the Odyssey took his captors cap

Nævius and Ennius, following in the path thus opened, gave Italy its first epics; Ter'ence and Plautus made the people familiar with the humors of comedy; and Cato imparted dignity to Latin prose.

Oratory, for which the Romans had a natural aptitude, culminated in the speeches of Cicero, who ushered in the golden age. In his writings, as well as in the histories of Cæsar, Sallust, and Livy, prose now attracted with its finished periods. Nor was poetry less notably represented. Catullus, vehement and pathetic by turns, transplanted the ode and epigram to Italy; Lucre'tius threw into verse his ideal of philosophy; Tibullus excelled in simplicity and tenderness; while Virgil and Horace rivalled, as they doubtless imitated, the first poets of Greece.

B

Virgil's epic, the Æne'id, as remarkable for beauty as Homer's is for grandeur, secured to its author the first place among Latin poets; and next to him stands Horace, with his faultless mastery of metre and keen observation of men and manners. Their genius shed on the court of the first emperor, Augustus, a peculiar lustre, still recognized in our application of the epithet Augustan to the most brilliant period of a nation's literature.

It is not strange that under the tyranny of the Cæsars literary decay set in; yet Rome's silver age was kept bright by the labors of Persius and Juvenal, the unsparing satirists; Lucan, author of the epic Pharsalia; the grave and accurate historian Tacitus; the two Plinies; and Quintilian, the rhetorician. Taste, however, had sadly deteriorated; genius died with patriotism; and despots sought in vain to restore for their own corrupt purposes the ancient spirit which they had crushed out. At length the degenerate Latin writers laid aside their own manly tongue for Greek; and the list of the monuments of Roman genius was complete.

Such has been, in general, the course of every literature. We trace successively the birth of poetry; the gradual perfecting of prose; the ripening of simplicity into elegance; the perversion of elegance into affectation; the language and literature, losing the vigor of manhood, affected with the feebleness of age, and either succumbing at once to some great civil convulsion or perishing by a slow but no less certain living death. As with political, so with literary history:

"This is the moral of all human tales;

'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,-
First freedom, and then glory; when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last;
And History, with all its volumes vast,

Hath but one page."

BYRON.

PART I

ANCIENT ORIENTAL LITERATURES.

CHAPTER I.

HINDOO LITERATURE.

THE SANSCRIT LANGUAGE.

Characteristics.-Oldest of all the Indo-European tongues, and most closely resembling the common parent that is lost, is SANSCRIT the language spoken by those fair-skinned Aryans who more than thirty centuries ago, swarming through the Hindoo Koosh passes, made the sunny plains of Hindostan their own (page 16). Sanscrit spread over most of the peninsula; and the meaning of the word, perfected, is significant of the flexibility, refinement, regularity, and philosophical system of grammar, by which the language was distinguished. In luxuriance of inflection it was unequalled. Its nouns were varied according to eight cases, and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural); and its verbs, which assumed causal, desiderative, and frequentative forms, were carried in conjugation through three voices, the active, middle, and passive. Its chief fault-a result of its very richness-lay in the frequent use of long compounds, particularly adjectives, presenting what seems to us a confused combination of ideas, sometimes ludicrously lengthened out; as in the expressions, "always-to-beremembered-with-reverence patriot," "water-play-delighted

maiden-bathing-fragrant river-breezes" (that is, river-breezes made fragrant by the bathing of maidens delighted with sporting in the water).

Neither the parallelism of Hebrew poetry (page 89) nor the rhyme of modern times finds a place in Sanscrit verse; it is, distinguished from prose, like Greek poetry, simply by a metrical arrangement of long and short syllables. The measured cadence gave great delight to the cultivated ear of the Hin

doos. "There are two excellent things in the world," says one of their writers" the friendship of the good, and the beauties of poetry."

Sanscrit is now a dead language. About three hundred years before the Christian era, dialects derived from it took its place among the people, and it has since been kept alive only in the conversation and writings of the learned, as the sacred language. of the Brahmans, or priestly caste.* Yet so exten

sive is its literature that it costs a Brahman half his life to master a portion of its sacred books alone.

Sanscrit Alphabet.-As to the origin of the Sanscrit alphabet, consisting of fifty letters, history is silent. It is believed that the entire early literature was preserved for centuries by

EARLY RESEARCHES.

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oral repetition. When their polished tongue was first expressed in written characters-derived directly or indirectly from the Phoenicians-so perfectly did these answer the purpose that the Hindoos styled their alphabet "the writing of the gods." The Sanscrit letters are still preserved in the written language of the pure Hindoos, but in that of the Mohammedan population have been replaced with the Arabic characters.

History of Sanscrit Researches.-Arabian translations of Sanscrit works were made as early as the reign of the Caliph Haroun'-al-Raschid, at Bagdad (800 A.D.), and appeared from time to time in the succeeding centuries. Europeans first knew of the existence of Sanscrit and its literature during the reign of Au'rungzebe (1658-1707), in whose time the French and English obtained a foothold in Hindostan. Before this, the Jesuit Nobili (no'be-le) had gone to India to study the sacred books with a view to the conversion of the Hindoos, and, having mastered them, boldly preached a new Veda; but he died on the scene of his labors, and Europe profited nothing by his researches. It was left for the Asiatic Society, organized at Calcutta in 1784 by Sir William Jones, to open the eyes of Europe to the importance and magnitude of Brahman literature, of which the translation of Sakoon'talâ (page 50) by this great orientalist gave a most favorable specimen.

Following in the footsteps of the English scholar just mentioned, the German critic Schlegel, in his “Language and Wisdom of the Indians" (1808) laid the permanent foundations of COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY, a science of recent birth but one that has been of incalculable service to history, establishing the kinship of the Hindoos and Persians with the old Greeks and Romans, as well as the modern nations of the west, by striking resemblances in their respective tongues. Eminent scholars have since prosecuted the work with enthusiasm― especially Bopp, Humboldt, Pott, and Grimm among the Ger