ng over three thousand four hundred years. With the
exception of China there is nothing like this in the whole world.

It is difficult to give an idea of the enormous extent and variety of
that literature. We are only gradually becoming acquainted with the
untold treasures which still exist in manuscripts, and with the titles
of that still larger number of works which must have existed formerly,
some of them being still quoted by writers of the last three or four
centuries.[97]

The Indian Government has of late years ordered a kind of
bibliographical survey of India to be made, and has sent some learned
Sanskrit scholars, both European and native, to places where
collections of Sanskrit MSS. are known to exist, in order to examine
and catalogue them. Some of these catalogues have been published, and
we learn from them that the number of separate works in Sanskrit, of
which mss. are still in existence, amounts to about 10,000.[98] This
is more, I believe, than the whole classical literature of Greece and
Italy put together. Much of it, no doubt, will be called mere rubbish;
but then you know that even in our days the writings of a very eminent
philosopher have been called "mere rubbish." What I wish you to see is
this, that there runs through the whole history of India, through its
three or four thousand years, a high road, or, it is perhaps more
accurate to say, a high mountain-path of literature. It may be remote
from the turmoil of the plain, hardly visible perhaps to the millions
of human beings in their daily struggle of life. It may have been
trodden by a few solitary wanderers only. But to the historian of the
human race, to the student of the development of the human mind, those
few solitary wanderers are after all the true representatives of India
from age to age. Do not let us be deceived. The true history of the
world must always be the history of the few; and as we measure the
Himalaya by the height of Mount Everest, we must take the true measure
of India from the poets of the Veda, the sages of the Upanishads, the
founders of the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies, and the authors of
the oldest law-books, and not from the millions who are born and die
in their villages, and who have never for one moment been roused out
of their drowsy dream of life.

To large multitudes in India, no doubt, Sanskrit literature was not
merely a dead literature, it was simply non-existent; but the same
might be said of almost