296 A RETROSPECT OF LITERATURE, &c. No II. Literature of the Hindoos. ALTHOUGH the modern Hindoos are generally distinguished by deplorable mental as well as bodily imbecility, they are the descendants of ancestors not less conspicuous both for intellectual and physical power. Learning is said to have flourished in India before it was cultivated in Egypt, and some have assumed that it was from beyond the Indus that the Nile itself was first visited with the orient beams of knowledge. The modern Hindoos, however, in their unutterable degradation, are only careful to preserve the monuments of their forefathers' glory and intelligence in the stupendous ruins, or, rather, in the imperishable skeletons of their temples, and in their sacred and scientific books. But the latter being wholly in the hands of the Brahmins, few of whom understand much of their contents, are impregnably sealed from the researches of the multitude. The astronomical tables of the ancient Indians are yet the admiration of Europeans, considering the disadvantages under which they were framed; and if there remained no other discernible traces of learning, these would mark a high degree of civilisation among the people that could calculate them. Dwelling, like their contemporaries the Chaldeans and Babylonians, in immense plains, where, over an unbroken circle of horizon below, a perfect hemisphere of sky was expanded above, they watched the motions of the stars, while they guarded their flocks by night, and learned to read with certainty, in the phases of the heavens, the signs of times and seasons useful to the husbandman and the mariner. But, unsatisfied with these, they vainly endeavoured to find out what the heavens could not teach the destinies of individuals and the revolutions of empires. The sacred books of the Hindoos, which are yet preserved, (so far as their authenticity can be deemed probable, and their institutes have been explored,) display a corresponding elegance of style, simplicity of thought, and purity of doctrine, in all these respects differing essentially from the monstrous fables, the bloody precepts, and shocking abominations with which their more modern writings abound. affinity between the architecture and hieroglyphics of India and Egypt indicates the common origin of both, and almost necessarily implies the senior claims of the former; for science, like empire, has uniformly travelled westward in its great cycle, whatever occasional retrogradation may have been caused by dis The turbing forces. Egypt, with all its wonders, can boast nothing so magnificent as the Caves of Elora, consisting of a series of temples, sixteen in number, a mile and a half in length, and each from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in breadth, with heights proportioned, all sculptured out of the live rock by labour incalculable, and with skill only equalled by the grandeur of the edifices on which they have been expended. Edifices, however, they are not, in the proper sense of the word. The men of those days found in the heart of their country a mountain of granite equal to the site of a modern city. They excavated the solid mass, not building up, but bringing out, like the statue from the marble, the multitudinous design; shaping sanctuaries, with their roofs and walls, and decorating them with gigantic images and shrines, by removing the fragments as they were hewn away, till the whole was presented standing upon innumerable pillars, left in the places where they had been identified with the original block; the range of temples, from the flint pavement to the vaulted roof, being in fact one stone, wrought out of the darkness of its native quarry, open to the sun and pervious to the breeze through all its recesses. It seems as though the master-spirits who planned this work had caught the sublime idea from their own prolific tree, which, casting its boughs on every side, takes fresh root at the extremity of each when it touches the soil, and multiplies itself into a forest from one stem. Milton, from such an architectural tree, represents our first parents, after their fall, as others, the true history, nay even the personal existence of these supposed claimants, must be ascertained before the unappropriated honour can be conceded to any one of them. It may, meanwhile, be affirmed, as one of those circumstances humbling to human pride that occasionally occur in history, and which, while they strangely stir the imagination, awaken sublime but melancholy reflection in minds given to muse upon the vanity and mortality of all the things that are done under the sun,-it may be affirmed, as one of these humbling circumstances, that the man who conquered the greatest trophy ever won from fate and oblivion, lost his own name, after divulging the secret by which others might immortalise theirs. As a figure of speech, one may be allowed to wish that the first letters in which he wrote that name, whether with a pen of iron on granite, or with his finger in sand, had remained indelible. But his own invention is his monument, which, like the undated and uninscribed pyramid, will remain a wonder and a riddle to the end of the world. - It is allowed, I believe, on all hands, that the Egyptians, from time whereof the memory of man knoweth not to the contrary, possessed three kinds of writing, hieroglyphical, alphabetical, and, probably, as a link between, logographic, of which latter the Chinese is the only surviving example at this day. Indeed, in all countries where society has emerged from the stagnation of barbarism, and has made but little advance towards civilisation, there have been found evidences of attempts to create a language for the eye, either by figures of things, by arbitrary yond the passing moment for the most permanent, or the most precious of these; they are as much in jeopardy as ever, after having escaped the changes and chances of thousands of years. An earthquake may suddenly ingulph the pyramids of Egypt, and leave the sand of the Desert as blank as the tide would have left it on the sea-shore. A hammer in the hand of an idiot may break to pieces the Apollo Belvedere, or the Venus de' Medici, which are scarcely less worshipped as miracles of art in our day, than they were by idolaters of old as representatives of deities. Looking abroad over the whole world, after the lapse of nearly six thousand years, what have we of the past but the words in which its history is recorded? What beside a few mouldering and brittle ruins, which time is imperceptibly touching down into dust,—what, beside these, remains of the glory, the grandeur, the intelligence, the supremacy of the Grecian republics, or the empire of Rome? Nothing but the words of poets, historians, philosophers, and orators, who being dead yet speak, and in their immortal works still maintain their dominion over inferior minds through all posterity. And these intellectual sovereigns not only govern our spirits from the tomb by the power of their thoughts, but their very voices are heard by our living ears in the accents of their mother-tongues. The beauty, the eloquence, and art of these collocations of sounds and syllables, the learned alone can appreciate, and that only (in some cases) after long, intense, and laborious investigation; but as thought can be made to transmigrate from one |