Damyanti, bewailing her lost husband, exclaims :

"Long as my soul within this body dwells,
So long in it will Nala not reside,

As glowing fire within the heated iron?"

The following is a striking passage:

"And now the sun had set with crimson tinge;
The lotus red had lost its glowing hue,
From which it was apparent to the eye
The sun had been a most notorious thief:
The colour of his beams the fact discloses.
But soon he lost his most unlawful gain,
And suffer'd for the sly nefarious deed :

The darkness thicken'd round his path-to show
That loss of glory is the fruit of sin."

The subjoined quotations may be regarded as evincing the tendency of Hinduism to neutralize the force of natural conscience; on the one hand, referring events to divine decree, and on the other, to satanic influence. This reference of events, that proceed on many occasions from deliberate choice, is sometimes made the ground of palliating crime; and the subterfuge may often be met with in one's intercourse with the people. This tendency is not, however, confined to the Hindu philosophy—it is exemplified in western countries, and seems to be natural to the human family. Our own immortal bard has very felicitously expressed the pitiable shifts of those who would attribute their evil practices to aught but themselves. "When we are sick," he says, "often the effect of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disorders, the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were felonious by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and traitors by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by divine thrusting on."

So Nala's unnatural abandonment of Damyanta is expressed as follows:

"His heart reproach'd him for the cruel deed,
His only consolation was in fate—-

That so it happens in an evil hour

The strongest foes he had subdued before,
But now by Kali, moral evil conquer'd."

Apostrophising her selfish and traitorous husband, Damyanti says

"Shall I impute it to the want of love?
Ah! no! be far from thee all treachery!
I know that some malignant power unseen
Has led thee to commit this foolish act,

And therefore from my heart forgive thee all."

These examples must suffice as specimens of Sanscrit writers. They will, I am inclined to think, produce a favourable impression, and together with what has been advanced on the language, and other branches of literature, induce the conviction that the Hindus, early enjoying, as they unquestionably did, the advantages which refined language and literature impart, must have attained to a high standard of civilization at a period long anterior to the Christian era. One or two general remarks may close the notices required in elucidation of the Sanscrit language and its literature.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharat determine the character of the Indian epos, and to a certain degree the whole range of the national poetry. This being the case, the poetry of the Vernaculars, indeed almost all the literature of the Vernaculars, bears a relation to those two great epics, and other original Sanscrit works, exactly the same as Latin literature bears to Greek. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer reappear in Latin authors. A parallel might be run between the authors in Greek and Latin, Sanscrit and the Vernaculars. The latter are echoes, many of them faint indeed, of the voice that speaks in the sacred tongue.

The theories of the Hindus on physical and religious subjects give a character to their entire literature. The doctrine

of Pantheism invests all nature, animate, and inanimate, human and divine, with a community of being; and hence the facility with which a human personage becomes superhuman or infra-human. Those who were wont to figure on earth as heroes, in the embattled-field, or as sages in the solitude of forests, appear in the abodes of Paradise. Divinities, known as the inhabitants of celestial mansions, appear as men; and the ever-playful fancy of the Hindu disposes of them as he pleases in endlessly varied places, and in equally diversified offices and relationships. They assume any shape and animate any object. Hanuman leads his monkeys; Yamvent is the king of bears; and Garud is the prince of eagles. In Greek poetry, gods are subordinate actors, affecting the destiny of human beings; in Hindu poetry they become the principals.

It has therefore been suggested that the Hindu epic and the sacred poetry of the English and German writers are possessed of some resemblance. Heeren has a bold thought on this point. In reading Milton myself I have often been struck with the remarkable coincidence there is between his sentiments, his imagery and his machinery, and those of some of the Hindu writers. Had he lived at a later period one could not have resisted the conviction that he had borrowed from the Hindu. Heeren says, "May we not be allowed to conjecture that during a separation of some thousand years, admitting the connexion between the Anglo-German and Hindu nations, they have mutually preserved that sentiment of the divine and heavenly, which afterwards burst forth in their respective epic writers at the same time with the rise of their national poetry? And may we not suppose that Vyása and Klopstock, Vamiki and Milton, though far removed from each other by the longest intervals of space and time, were nevertheless animated by the same spirit?" Had he been a Hindu he might have supposed these poets the same person, appearing at successive periods.

CHAPTER VI.

LANGUAGES:-URDU-ABORIGINAL THE TAMIL, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND MERITS; ITS PROSE AND POETIC DIALECTS-TAMIL LITERATURESPECIMENS FROM AVVEYAR, TIRUVALUVAR, AND KABILAR,—JESUIT AUTHORS-THEIR WORKS-PRESENT STATE OF LITERATURE IN INDIANATIVE, ROMISH, AND PROTESTANT-BIBLE TRANSLATION-LITURGICAL VERSIONS-GENERAL LITERATURE-CHEERING PROSPECTS.

As the subject of language is one of considerable interest and importance in regard to the Anglo-Indian empire, I have endeavoured to elucidate it, as far as possible, in the Map attached to this volume. By a reference to the map and its language-key, the reader may at once ascertain the territorial limits within which the nineteen languages are vernacular.

In regard to the sixth language in the enumeration, the Urdu, it may be as well to state that it is not an original Hindu language, but one that has sprung from the Mohammedan conquest. It bears very much the same relation as the English to the events of history. As the English language was formed by an admixture of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, so the Urdu, often called Hindostanee, was formed of several dialects, after the invasion of the country by the Mohammedans. The account of the origin of the Urdu is given as follows:

When Akbar succeeded to the throne of Delhi, A. D. 1555, various races, Hindu and Mussulman, presented themselves in the royal city. They differed in language and dialect; but when they came to live and traffic together, one language, termed Urdu, became definitely fixed. The word Urdu

signifies camp, and serves to indicate the origin of this comparatively new language, which consists of Persian and Arabic, brought in by the invaders, and Hindi, one of the cognates of the Sacred Sanscrit.

Having completed the brief notices it was judged fit to offer on the subject of the Hindu sacred language and its literature, it is now intended to add some further information relative to the other family of languages already referred to.

That the religion and literature, as well as the political constitution, of the South of India, were derived from the north, the earliest seat of the Hindu empire, as well as of the arts and sciences,-and that the southern peninsula was before that period a vast, uncultivated forest, inhabited by small and insulated tribes, speaking a jargon which hardly furnished them with terms expressive of their immediate and natural wants,—there is scarcely any doubt. While in this state, a sage named Agastya appears to have conveyed thither the first colony of Brahmans, and other classes, from the north, and with them the Hindu religion and literature, in form the same as at the present day. He is believed to have been the inventor of the letters now in use in the Tamil, and the first who refined the southern language, the Tamil, on the principles of the Sanscrit cultivated in the north.

Whether, prior to the introduction of the Sanscrit, and the establishment of the Brahmanized race, there were more than one language common to India generally, we have not at present the means of deciding. Sufficient information we have to establish the fact of an affinity between the Tamil language spoken in the south of India, and some of the dialects spoken by the semi-barbarous tribes of the hills; and I have been informed by those competent to give information on the subject, that there is a striking similarity between this family of language and the Scythian tongues. It may be hoped that the inquiries of Orientalists will be pushed forward on this and kindred subjects, and through their successful