uggestive as its work has been, is gone already farther than is
judicious. The Rig Veda in part is synchronous with an advanced
ritualism, subjected to it, and in some cases derived from it; but in
part the hymns are "made for their own sake and not for the sake of
any sacrificial performance," as said Muller of the whole; going in
this too far, but not into greater error than are gone they that
confuse the natural with the artificial, the poetical with the
mechanical, gold with dross. It may be true that the books of the Rig
Veda are chiefly family-books for the _soma_-cult, but even were it
true it would in no wise impugn the poetic character of some of the
hymns contained in these books. The drag-net has scooped up old and
new, good and bad, together. The Rig Veda is not of one period or of
one sort. It is a 'Collection,' as says its name. It is essentially
impossible that any sweeping statement in regard to its character
should be true if that character be regarded as uniform. To say that
the Rig Veda represents an age of childlike thought, a period before
the priestly ritual began its spiritual blight, is incorrect. But no
less incorrect is it to assert that the Rig Veda represents a period
when hymns are made only for rubrication by priests that sing only for
baksheesh. Scholars are too prone to-day to speak of the Rig Veda in
the same way as the Greeks spoke of Homer. It is to be hoped that the
time may soon come when critics will no longer talk about the
Collection as if it were all made in the same circumstances and at the
same time; above all is it desirable that the literary quality of the
hymns may receive due attention, and that there may be less of those
universal asseverations which treat the productions of generations of
poets as if they were the work of a single author.

In respect of the method of reading into the Rig Veda what is found in
parallel passages in the Atharva Veda and Br[=a]hmanas, a practice
much favored by Ludwig and others, the results of its application have
been singularly futile in passages of importance. Often a varied
reading will make clearer a doubtful verse, but it by no means follows
that the better reading is the truer. There always remains the lurking
suspicion that the reason the variant is more intelligible is that its
inventor did not understand the original. As to real elucidation of
other sort by the later texts, in the minutiae of the outer world, in
details of priestcr