A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans c6.9

c6.9

mind. Learned Greeks who were taking refuge in the west of Europe, particularly in Italy, had brought with them a sufficient knowledge to teach their language and literature; and they were able and ready to guide the studies of those who were afterwards to contribute to the revival of classical learning in Europe. Men began where they ought to begin, namely, with Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides, and not with Anacreontic poetry or Neo-Platonist philosophy. But when our earliest Sanskrit scholars directed their attention to Indian literature, the difficulties they had to struggle with were far greater. Not to mention the burning and enervating sky of India, and the burden of their official occupations, men like Halhed, Wilkins, and Sir W. Jones could hardly find a single Brahman who would undertake to teach them his sacred idiom. When, after some time, learned Pandits became more willing to impart their knowledge to Europeans, their own views of Indian history and literature were more apt to mislead their pupils than to guide them, in a truly historical direction. Thus it happened that, at the beginning of Sanskrit philology, preference was given either to works which still enjoyed amongst the Hindus themselves a great, but frequently undeserved, popularity, or to those which by their poetical beauty attracted the attention of men of taste. Everything Indian, whether Manu’s Code of Laws, the Bhagavadgîtâ, Śakuntala, or the Hitopadeśa, was at that time considered to be of great and extravagant antiquity, and it was extremely difficult for European scholars to form a right opinion on the real merits of Indian literature. The literary specimens received from India were generally fragments only of larger works: