:

accessible in print. The establishment of a literary organ for Indian lore in Germany by the Schlegels (1820) was an event of prime importance. After issuing, during ten years, occasional numbers, written chiefly by themselves, they reaped their reward the band of Orientalists was now strong enough to set up a regular quarterly journal,* which steadily continued its work, until in 1844 the small band had swelled into a powerful cohort, able to constitute itself a "German Oriental Society," and maintain a larger journal, establish a library, subsidise the publication of important oriental works, and otherwise further their great object-the advancement of the knowledge of Asiatic civilisation. And in 1849, so copious was the information to be imparted, or so manifold the subjects to be discussed, having connection with India, that it was found desirable to establish a separate journal specially devoted to topics of Indian literature.† In 1820, Schlegel complained bitterly of the difficulty of obtaining, even through the mediation of English friends, and at considerable expense, any books published in India; now there are booksellers in Berlin and Leipzig who maintain direct communication with Calcutta. In 1820, there was no fount of Sanskrit types in Germany, nor, we believe, on the Continent; now every university-town of eminence possesses them; and whereas then the publication of a Sanskrit work required to be fortified by a strong list of subscribers, or subsidised by an Academy, now the largest works are frequently undertaken by a bookseller at his own risk.

We have entered into these details for the double purpose of indicating by tangible facts the surprising increase in the European knowledge of and interest in Ancient India, and of showing that with this steady accumulation of new matter has grown up the desirability, and the possibility, of a new descriptive work, which should be for the year 1857 what Bohlen's was for 1830.

In the mean time a great work has been progressing, which purports to treat as exhaustively as possible the subject of Indian antiquity. The first volume of Professor Lassen's Indische Alterthumskunde appeared in 1847, the second in 1849, and a first. instalment of the third has just reached us. There are 2,650 closely printed octavo pages: of which geography occupies 352; ethnology, 112; chronology, 72; history, 1000; history of religion, literature, the sciences, geographical knowledge, commerce, and natural products, 577; history of the Greek knowledge of India, 341; appendices, 65; and, alas, corrections and additions, 96. The last item indicates the worst feature of this valuable

* Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes.

† Weber's Indische Studien.

work; it is too often negligently composed and carelessly printed; and the author's proneness to seize the opportunity afforded by a list of addenda and corrigenda to enlarge, modify, or retract some statement in the text, besides causing an unwelcome increase of labour to the reader, produces an uncomfortable sense of insecurity in his mind. However, we must not be too hard upon Lassen. Dealing with a vast unsifted mass of writings in English, French, and German; in Greek and Latin; in Sanskrit, Pâli, Arabic, Persian, Tibetan, and Chinese; and with the legends of oriental coins, he has had to pioneer his way through a dense forest of historic materials, and at every step to secure his footing before adventuring further. At the outset success would have seemed unattainable by the powers of a single man; and wonder it is that he has paved so firm a road. It was inevitable from the very nature of the enterprise that the book should be a large, and not a popular one; but we see cause, besides, to charge it with faults of construction not inevitable. The arrangement of the work proposed at the outset is artificial, and has been found actually unworkable; and it contributes to hamper the writer, to swell the work unnecessarily by saying in two places what might be said in one, and to bewilder the reader by rendering him uncertain where he should look for information on a given subject. The formal separation of the outward and the inward, the political and the religious, the public and the private history of a people, is surely little in accordance with a true conception of history. The threads of both branches are inseparably interwoven; and as with individuals, any system of biography which should sunder Bacon the statesman from Bacon the philosopher would be palpably absurd, and the estimate of his character founded upon his statesmanship incomplete, or even false, till filled in by that based on his philosophy; so with nations, their religious ideas are ever acting on their political system, and their political position determining their spiritual development in religion and art. Nor is it easy to see how with the Indians, for whom, as for the Jews, laws have a divine sanction, it will be possible to separate the " action of their mind in the state and the family" from its "development in religion." Thus the first part, the geographical, is the only one which could satisfactorily be treated independently. We are not therefore surprised, that into the second part (not yet completed) the author has felt himself compelled to insert chapters, not indeed on literature, philosophy,

* Book I. Description of the countries of India, their climate, products, &c. II. Their political history. III. and IV. Development of the Indian mind in religion and literature, art and science. V. and VI. Action of the Indian mind in the State (constitution) and the Family.

and religion, but on their history, which seem stolen from the later books. The divorce of the history from the aesthetics of literature, of the history from the dogmas of religion, is surely very undesirable. Cut off from æsthetical criticism, the history of literature becomes a dry discussion on dates and authorship; separated from the dogmatical or spiritual portion, religion can only count up the objects of its worship, and fix the chronology of its leading manifestations. Thus a large part of Lassen's work labours under an incurable dryness, which in our opinion is mainly due to the relegation of the quickening streams of religion, literature, and art, to a subsequent book. And this would go far to discourage those not possessing the true German desire to fathom a subject to the bottom, from adventuring on the shoreless sea of Indian antiquity at all.

Mrs. Speir has described Ancient India picturesquely, and therefore popularly. She leads the reader into no abstruse discussions on dates; wastes not his patience, nor trifles with his time, by examining the legends of coins written in barbarous tongues and characters, for the chance of adding one more name to a dynasty of unknown kings; enters not into all the vexatious details of ritual and caste laws;-but from a rich store of knowledge, which disdains not to embrace these matters too, she brings forth the most pregnant illustrations of the social and religious systems of the people and age under review, the great leading features of their epic story, the most sparkling gems of their lyric verse and in the history contrives, by slightly indicating the obscurer periods, and tracing out the imposing heroic forms of the more brilliant ones in bold outline, to satisfy the reader's curiosity and leave his mind clear. For a connected history, including the less known epochs and the less important dynasties; for a complete survey of the Sanskrit literature, embracing fables and stories and the later dramas; for a full view of the Indian philosophical systems, and for a minute description of the achievements of Indian art,-we must of course consult larger and more special works; but for a faithful picture of the leading features of the history, literature, philosophy, and art, we need not wish for a better or a larger one than Mrs. Speir's. The ordinary reader, who desires to estimate what part India has borne in the general history of civilisation, may here have his desires satisfied; and the student who intends to drink deeper at the springs of Indian wisdom, will be thankful for this handbook to teach him what to expect, and where to find. In her manner of handling her subjects she betrays a quiet mastery over them, which would give the reader full confidence that she has had recourse to the best and most recent authorities, were this not attested by scholarlike references on almost every page.

Of the truth and beauty of her moral judgments we mean to give the reader an opportunity of judging; of the freshness and vigour with which she can reproduce a forgotten type of society like the Vedic, we can give no idea, unless we were to extract the whole chapter.

The most striking circumstance with regard to the ancient civilisation of India, and that which opposes the most formidable barrier in the way of those who endeavour to present its salient features, is the utter absence of any thing like credible history. The Indians have never had any correct feeling of the difference between fact and fable. In the Greek history, the line of demarcation between the mythic and the historic age is tolerably well defined; and is confessed by the admission that with the Trojan war the heroic age found its limit. The line may there have been differently drawn in different Grecian states, according to their advance in culture; and in later times we do find personages, such as Lycurgus, whose half-mythic half-historic nature perplexes the historian: but we find ourselves already under a different heaven: national leaders are content to be of purely human parentage; rivers endued with human form and voice no more enter the lists as worthy opponents of the chief of warriors; kings no longer boast a progeny of fifty sons, living in fifty golden palaces. In India no such limit is discernible; kings continue to trace their descent from Sun and Moon, and reign for hundreds of years; the ninety-nine sons of one are all murdered and supplanted by the hundredth; and gods and giants appear on the scene when we fancied we were drawing nearer the historic period. Chronology is hopelessly at fault; confounding various kings of the same name; assigning reigns of an impossible length to fill up gaps, even in comparatively recent times; and extending the lives of the older rulers to a more than patriarchal length, in accommodation to the preconceived system of four ages of the world. Buddhism, which imparted the first impulse towards systematic history, would in some aspects almost appear to have brought back the mythic age again with more than mythic fantasy, when we see Buddha himself transformed into a god, and regarded as the twenty-fifth in a series of mythic Buddhas who have appeared in the various ages of the world; when we see, further, the first-fruits of the system in the novel notion of saints flying through the air, animals paying service to holy men, stars acting as guide-posts, demons endowed with human forms, and able to commute these at pleasure with those of beasts. Nay, even the names of Buddha's mother and nurse betray the allegory of mythology: for the word Mâyâ "is a philosophical term, and denotes the creative power of the deity; his mother had probably therefore originally another

name. This conjecture is confirmed by the fact that her sister, who became Buddha's nurse, is called Prajâpatî (creatrix), especially as this name is nowhere else found as the name of a female."* It is true that in the history of Buddhism we have the advantage of being able to compare together accounts from very different, indeed independent, sources, namely, the books of the northern Buddhists (China and Tibet), and those of the southern (Ceylon); and that this, affording a basis for something like historical criticism, enables us to some extent to divest the simple facts of Buddhism from the gorgeous and fantastic drapery of fables which was gradually thrown around it. Still some mythic elements (as that of Mâyâ) remain; and nothing is yet done towards fixing the chronology of that great turningpoint in the history of Asia.

In the absence of any native accounts upon which, unsup-, ported from other sources, reliance can be placed, the means at our disposal for the history of India are, the testimony of foreign writers, especially Greek, and to a smaller extent Roman, Tibetan, Chinese, and Arabic; inscriptions; and coins. The Greek testimony is borne by Herodotus and Ctesias alone, for the period previous to Alexander; for the succeeding period most notably by Megasthenes, whose accurate observation of geography, products, and manners, Lassen, reviewing his statements in detail, finds reason to admire at every step; further, by Nearchus, Bardesanes, and other later writers. But of the history of India the Greeks knew next to nothing. The Tibetan and Chinese books are an authority solely for the Buddhistic history of India; and the Arabic for the period subsequent to the Mohammedan conquest (A.D. 1001). The coins are of more extensive utility; but as the art appears to have been introduced by the Greeks, and in consequence practised chiefly in the northern kingdoms, numismatic authority is limited both as to place and time. And the coins have only begun to be collected and questioned since 1828 at the earliest, when James Prinsep "plunged into the subject with all the ardour of youth and genius. . . . . Mr. Prinsep and his enthusiastic young friends studied and collected coins. . . He commenced with very little knowledge of Oriental languages; but his generous ardour brought him every required assistance."+ So that "with regard to coins, inquirers into Indian history are not, as with inscriptions, in possession of the advantage of being able to avail themselves of a great number of these memorials." There remain the inscriptions, which are inscribed either on rocks or on commemorative pillars. The oldest, the discovery and deciphering of which form an epoch in the restitution of Indian † Mrs. Speir, p. 223. Lassen, ii. 48.

* Lassen, ii. 68.