1900.] on Ancient Monuments In India. 57 



These monuments are, for the most part, though there are notable 

 exceptions, in British territory, and on soil belonging to Government. 

 Many of them are in out of the way places, and are liable to the com- 

 bined ravages of a tropical climate, an exuberant flora, and very often 

 a local and ignorant population, who sec only in an ancient building the 

 means of inexpensively raising a modern one for their own convenience. 

 All tliese circumstances expluin the peculiar responsibility that rests 

 upon Government in India. If there be any one who says to me that 

 there is no duty devolving upon a Christian Government to preserve the 

 monuments of a pagan art, or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot 

 pause to argue with such a man. Art, and beauty, and the reverence 

 that is owing to all that has evoked human genius, or has inspired 

 human faith, are independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the 

 sphere of religion, are embraced by the common religion of all mankind. 

 Viewed from this standpoint, the rock temple of the Brahmans stands 

 on precisely the same footing as the Buddhist Yiliara, and the Maho- 

 medan Musjid as the Christian Catliedral. There is no principle of 

 artistic discrimination between tlie mausoleum of the despot and the 

 sepulchre of the saint. What is beautiful, what is historic, what tears 

 the mask off the face of the past, and helps us to read its riddles, and to 

 look it in the eyes — these, and not the dogmas of a combative theology, 

 are the principal criteria to which we must look. Much of ancient 

 history, even in an age of great discoveries, still remains mere guess 

 work. It is only slowly being pieced together by the efforts of scholars 

 and by the outcome of research. But tlie clues are lying everywhere at 

 our hand, in buried cities, in undeciphered inscriptions, in casual coins, 

 in crumbling pillars, and pencilled slabs of stone. They supply the data 

 by which we may reconstruct the annals of the past, and recall to life 

 the morality, the liteiature, the politics, the art of a perished age. 



Compared with the antiquity of Assyrian or Egyptian, or even of 

 early European monuments, the age of the majority of Indian monu- 

 ments is not great. I speak subject to correction, but my impression 

 is that the oldest scupltured monument in India is the Sanchi Tope, the 

 great railing of which cannot possibly be placed before the middle of 

 the 3rd century before Ciirist, although the tope itself may be earlier. 

 At that time the palaces of Chaldoea and Nineveh, the Pyramids and the 

 rock tombs of Egypt, were alieady thousands of years old. We have no 

 building in India as old as the Parthenon at Athens ; the large majority 

 are young compared with the Coliseum at Rome. All the Norman and 

 the majority of the Gothic Cathedrals of England and of "Western 

 Europe were already erected before the great era of Moslem architecture 

 in India had begun. The Kutub Minar at Delhi, which is the finest 



