RECENT PROGRESS OF SANSKRIT STUDIES. 263 



pendent of it, though they have begun to admit Sanskrit words in a more or less 

 altered shape, from the period when the Sanskrit-speaking races first penetrated 

 into the southern parts of the peninsula. From this fundamental difference of 

 language we are led to conclude that the people of the south must belong to a 

 different race from the Sanskrit-speaking inhabitants of the north of India, and 

 that they were probably driven southward by the northern invaders soon after 

 the entrance of the latter into Hindostan from the north-west. 



I now pass from the language to the literature. This literature is of great 

 extent, and ranges over a period of three thousand years. It comprises large 

 collections of ancient hymns, liturgical treatises, theological tracts, voluminous 

 legendary and mythological poems, various systems of philosophical speculation, 

 numerous works on grammar, law, medicine, algebra, astronomy, astrology, and 

 a long list of dramatic and other poetical compositions. This literature presents 

 in certain respects a general likeness to that of Greece, but the points of dissimi- 

 larity are greater than those of resemblance. Philosophical speculation, mathe- 

 matical and astronomical science, have been cultivated in both countries. Epic 

 and dramatic poetry, too, are found in India as well as in Greece, though the 

 frequent exaggeration and extravagance of the Hindu conceptions stand in most 

 unfavourable contrast to the harmony and just proportion which distinguish the 

 creations of the Greek imagination. But there is another respect in which the 

 two literatures differ remarkably from one another. In Greece the earliest poetry 

 was mainly epic, whilst in India it was of a lyrical character. Instead of ballads 

 recounting chiefly the exploits of warriors (though without excluding mythology), 

 as in Greece, we find in India large collections of hymns celebrating almost ex- 

 clusively the praises of the national deities, and destined to be employed in their 

 worship. These hymns are succeeded by ritual treatises prescribing the order of 

 sacrifice, and by theological tracts, for all of which a divine authority is claimed. 

 There is nothing in Greek literature which presents any parallel to this. A 

 further difference is, that whilst in Greece epic poetry comes first in order, is 

 written in the oldest extant form of Greek, and represents to us the Hellenic 

 mythology in its earliest known phase, the same description of poetry appears in 

 India at a different epoch, long after the age of the hymns, and, unlike the latter. 

 is composed in Sanskrit, which, with the exception of a few obsolete grammatical 

 forms, is of the most modern character ; while at the same time the mythology 

 and the religious institutions which it brings before us are far more advanced 

 than those which we discover in the hymns. These Indian epics combine in 

 some degree the characteristics of the Homeric poems with those of the theogony 

 of Hesiod, but both of these elements assume in the Hindu works a far greater 

 magnitude, and a luxuriance which runs into extravagance ; and in the course of 

 ages, one of them, the Mahabharata, has swelled, by gradual accretions, to an 

 enormous "bulk. 



