ing family
life, village life, and state life, as founded on religion,
ceremonial, tradition and contract (samaya)--must in future pay the
same attention to the literature of the Vedic period as to the
literatures of Greece and Rome and Germany.

As to the lessons which the early literature of Buddhism may teach us,
I need not dwell on them at present. If I may judge from the numerous
questions that are addressed to me with regard to that religion and
its striking coincidences with Christianity, Buddhism has already
become a subject of general interest, and will and ought to become so
more and more.[104] On that whole class of literature, however, it is
not my intention to dwell in this short course of Lectures, which can
hardly suffice even for a general survey of Vedic literature, and for
an elucidation of the principal lessons which, I think, we may learn
from the Hymns, the Brahma_n_as, the Upanishads, and the Sutras.

It was a real misfortune that Sanskrit literature became first known
to the learned public in Europe through specimens belonging to the
second, or, what I called, the Renaissance period. The Bhagavadgita,
the plays of Kalidasa, such as _S_akuntala or Urva_s_i, a few episodes
from the Mahabharata and Ramaya_n_a, such as those of Nala and the
Ya_gn_adattabadha, the fables of the Hitopadesa, and the sentences of
Bhart_ri_hari are, no doubt, extremely curious; and as, at the time
when they first became known in Europe, they were represented to be of
extreme antiquity, and the work of a people formerly supposed to be
quite incapable of high literary efforts, they naturally attracted the
attention of men such as Sir William Jones in England, Herder and
Goethe in Germany, who were pleased to speak of them in terms of
highest admiration. It was the fashion at that time to speak of
Kalidasa, as, for instance, Alexander von Humboldt did even in so
recent a work as his Kosmos, as "the great contemporary of Virgil and
Horace, who lived at the splendid court of Vikramaditya," this
Vikramaditya being supposed to be the founder of the Samvat era, 56
B.C. But all this is now changed. Whoever the Vikramaditya was who is
supposed to have defeated the _S_akas, and to have founded another
era, the Samvat era, 56 B.C., he certainly did not live in the first
century B.C. Nor are the Indians looked upon any longer as an
illiterate race, and their poetry as popular and artless. On the
contrary, they are judged now by the s