t the time of marriage, during dalliance, in jest, or while
suffering great pain. It is evident that Venus laughed at lovers'
oaths in India as well as elsewhere; and that false testimony
extracted by torture was excused. Manu declared that in some cases the
giver of false evidence from a pious motive would not lose his seat in
heaven; indeed, that whenever the death of a man of any of the four
castes would be occasioned by true evidence, falsehood was even better
than truth. He gives as the primeval rule, to say what is true and
what is pleasant, but not what is true and unpleasant, or what is
pleasant and not true. The Vish_n_u-pura_n_a gives like counsel,
adding the following aphorism: "A considerate man will always
cultivate, in act, thought, and speech, that which is good for living
beings, both in this world and in the next." About the same license
appears to be used in this country and winked at.--A. W.]

[Footnote 78: I. 3412; III. 13844; VII. 8742; VIII. 3436, 3464.]

[Footnote 79: Mahabharata VIII. 3448.]

[Footnote 80: Muir, l. c. p. 268; Mahabharata I. 3095.]

[Footnote 81: Mahabharata I. 3015-16.]

[Footnote 82: This explains satisfactorily how the Hindoos became
liars, and of course admits that they did become so.--AM. PUBS.]

[Footnote 83: _S_atapatha Brahma_n_a, translated by Eggeling, "Sacred
Books of the East," vol. xii., p. 313, Sec. 20.]

[Footnote 84: Sir Charles Trevelyan, "Christianity and Hinduism," p.
81.]

[Footnote 85: IV. 65.]

[Footnote 86: VIII. 85.]

[Footnote 87: VIII. 90.]

[Footnote 88: VIII. 92.]

LECTURE III.

HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERATURE.

My first lecture was intended to remove the prejudice that India is
and always must be a strange country to us, and that those who have to
live there will find themselves stranded, and far away from that
living stream of thoughts and interests which carries us along in
England and in other countries of Europe.

My second lecture was directed against another prejudice, namely, that
the people of India with whom the young civil servants will have to
pass the best years of their life are a race so depraved morally, and
more particularly so devoid of any regard for truth, that they _must_
always remain strangers to us, and that any real fellowship or
friendship with them is quite out of the question.

To-day I shall have to grapple with a third prejudice, namely, that
the literature of India, and more especially th