than the scandals of courts, or the butcheries of nations, which fill so many pages of our Manuals of History. And all this work is only beginning, and whoever likes to labour in these the most ancient of historical archives will find plenty of discoveries to make and yet people ask, what is the use of learning Sanskrit?
We get accustomed to everything, and cease to wonder at what would h#ve startled our fathers and upset all their stratified notions, like a sudden earth-quake. Every child now learns at school that English is an Aryan or Indo-European language, that it be- longs to the Teutonic branch, and that this branch, together with the Italic, Greek, Celtic, Slavonic, Iranic, and Indie branches, all spring from the same stock, and form together the great Aryan or Indo- European family of speech.
But this, though it is taught now in our elementary schools, was really, but fifty years ago, like the opening of a new horizon of the world of the intellect, and the extension of a feeling of closest fraternity that made us feel at home where before we had been strangers, and changed millions of so-called barbarians into our own kith and kin. To speak the same language constitutes a closer union than to have drunk the same milk ; and Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, is substantially the same language as Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. This is a lesson which we should never have learnt but from a study of Indian language and literature, and if India had taught us nothing else, it would have taught us more than almost any other language ever did.
It is quite amusing, though instructive also, to read what was written by scholars and philosophers
