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BOOK NOTICES.
SEPTEMBER, 1875.]
use of Gunpowder in India, is a reprint, with some alterations and additions by Sir H. Elliot himself. The cornments on the Institutes of Jahangir, and the Bibliographical notices, are also his work. The extracts from the Shash Fat'h-i Kangra were prepared under his superintendence; those from a biographical work of 'Abdu-l Hakk Dehlawi were made by MajorA. R. Fuller, and the editor has supplied an oft-expressed want by giving a complete translation of the Introduction to Firishta's great history.
The volume will be found very valuable for the study of the particular period to which it relates, but we cannot but express disappointment that the materials supplied are given in so very fragmentary a form: many of the works from which extracts are translated would be quite unworthy of translation in full, and perhaps none of them are very deserving of this, but one of the best might have been selected for nearly entire translation, with summaries of all the omissions, and the extracts from other works made to do duty in the more subordinate form of notes to this text. The objections in the way of this would have been most trivial in comparison with the advantages to the general reader. Then much of the materials left ready to hand by Sir H. M. Elliot is being passed over because, in the editor's opinion, it is not sufficiently important to be published: a certain amount of judgment in this matter he ought doubtless to exercise, but no one, however well read in history, can say infallibly what scrap of information may or may not come to be of importance, and it would be much better that he gave us rather too much than too little of the MS. that lies ready to his hand-summarizing what he does not think at all worth printing in extenso, that his readers may know the real character and contents of the omissions.
But the greatest defect volumes such as these could have is the entire absence of indexes, and even of analytical tables of contents. This omission is but little creditable either to editor or publishers. as a good index is really indispensable for reference to volumes such as these, filled with extracts of the most varied contents, and treating again and again, under different authors, of the same personages and events.
INDIAN WISDOM, or Examples of the Religious, Philosophical, and Ethical Doctrines of the Hindus: with a brief History of the chief Departments of Sanskrit Literature, and some account of the Past and Present Condition of India Moral and Intellectual. By Monier Williams, M.A., Boden Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford. (London: W. H. Allen, 1875.)
The object of this book is briefly stated in the preface, and is a reply to the question, Is it possible to obtain from any one book a good
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general idea of the character and contents of Sanskrit literature? Is it possible to get an insight into the mind, habits of thought, and customs of the great Hindu people, and a correct knowledge of a system of belief and practice which has prevailed for three thousand years?
No one volume assuredly did contain a précis of such knowledge, and we are satisfied that any one who would have the patience to dip into these five hundred and odd pages, either systematically as a student, or cursorily as an amateur, would not fail to rise up with a feeling of pleasureful wonder at the intellectual phenomenon of an isolated literature of such expansion and such variety, yet free from contact with the outer world. The Hindu sage borrowed nothing, imitated nothing, was even aware of the existence of nothing beyond the limits of his literary consciousness and the peculiar bent of his own genius. In the dawn of his intellectual life he composed Vedic hymns and elaborated a system of nature-worship: to preserve the correct understanding of these treasures, he composed a system of commentaries and spun a web of grammar the like of which the world has never seen. As he advanced in self-consciousness, different orders of Hindu minds worked out different systems of philosophy, some religious, some opposed to all religions. As each generation overlaid the work of its predecessor. new dogmas arose, new modes of treatment of old doctrines, new definitics, new hair-splitting, which few can understand without contracting a headache, and the majority of mankind could not understand at all.
A later age began to make laws and codify laws, to construct a cast-iron system for the control of all future generations, the strangling of all new ideas, the arrest of all possible progressVain effort at Benares as at Rome! At the same time the fount of poetry, which lies at the bottom of the hearts of all nations, burst forth into magnificent epics in glorification of the heroes and demigods of the past: to them, in due course, succeeded the drama, and a class of poems which may be called elegiac, or lyric, and prose-writings of a didactic character. Last of all were the legendary tales and traditions, written in a later age to prop up the uncompromising pantheism to which centuries of intellectual isolation et philosophical conceit had reduced the Hindu, in spite of his fine intellect, unwearied industry, and magnificent literature. Of genuine history there is not one reliable fragment.
And the whole of this literature is clothed in Sanskrit, a language of unrivalled force, variety, and flexibility, wonderfully preserved, considering that for many centuries the Vedic hymns were
