A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans c7.4

c7.4

Now it seems that the regular and continuous Anushṭubh-śloka is a metre unknown during the Vedic age, and every work written in it may at once be put down as post-Vedic. It is no valid objection that this epic Śloka occurs also in Vedic hymns, that Anushṭubh verses are frequently quoted in the Brâhmaṇas, and that in some of the Sûtras the Anushṭubh-śloka occurs intermixed with Trishṭubhs, and is used for the purpose of recapitulating¹ what had been explained before in prose. For it is only the uniform employment of that metre¹ which constitutes the characteristic mark of a new period of literature. Thus rhyme occasionally occurs in English poetry before the Norman period; yet, when we find whole poems written in rhyme and without the old Teutonic system of alliteration, we are sure that they cannot have been composed in an Ante-Norman period. The elegiac measure seems to have been used before Callinus; yet Callinus and Archilochus are always mentioned as the inventors of it:—that is, they were the first to sanction the uniform employment of this metre for entire poetical compositions. Hence no elegiac poem can be previous to the close of the 8th century B.C. The same applies to the iambus, the invention of which is commonly ascribed to Archilochus; although iambics occur interspersed in the Margites, a poem ascribed to Homer by no less an authority than Aristotle.² In the history of German literature we have several instances where poems of the 12th century¹ had to be recast as early as the 13th, on account of their metre and language; which, during this period of rapid transition, had already become obsolete and unreadable.