the East was regarded as an impiety. Even as far back as the Rig-veda we read of Vâch, the goddess of language, and it is not too much to say that the entire laws of phonetics and the permutation of letters the very bases therefore of all etymology, and of all rational grammar-are due to the discovery of Sanskrit. In these days the merest tiro ought to know, and it is to be hoped that, in spite of the sterility of our grammatical teaching,* he soon will know, facts of the deepest interest and the most beautiful simplicity about Greek and Latin-facts which treble their interest, which lighten up all their difficulties, and change their anomalies into illustrations of curious and valuable laws. what has the discovery of Sanskrit done for grammar? It has taught us the essentially important distinction between the material and the formal element of words, For *It is a discreditable fact, but it most assuredly is a fact, that in the days of Bopp and Steinthal and Schleicher, much of our socalled grammatical teaching is even more empty and infructuous than if we had been living in the days of Sanctius. It is to be hoped that the recent changes in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge may gradually produce a race of scholars and teachers not one of whom shall remain contented with the poor attempt-an attempt which so generally fails-to hammer into the heads of unwilling pupils a crude mass of forms and inflections respecting the very nature of which the boys continue to be, from first to last, as ignorant as their teachers. I have seen a good many foreign grammars, and have heard and seen something of grammatical teaching in foreign schools, and I doubt whether any grammars are so bad as most of ours, or any grammatical teaching so narrow and meaningless as that which passes for such in English schools. i. e., between the root, stem, inflective base, or what the Hindoos called the anga or body of the word, and those little syllables, mainly the débris of pronouns or of auxiliaries, hitherto deemed an absolute mystery, by means of which we express the mutual relations of ideas, which by the elasticity of their meaning lent themselves to every modification of the main conception, and by the fluidity of their form adapted themselves to every species of combination; which are the direct sources of that richness, clearness, and liberty of idiom which characterise Greek and Latin, and which by their plasticity have given to words the appearance of organised bodies, carrying in themselves the principle of their own development.' + 6 It is true that by a splendid guess, our own countryman Horne Tooke had, in his Diversions of Purley, stated with the utmost distinctness his belief in the fact that the terminations of nouns and verbs in declension and conjugation are themselves separate words with distinct meanings.' These terminations,' he says, ' are all explicable, and ought all to be explained, or'-he adds, with a contemptuous allusion to the Hermes, in which terminations were supposed to have arisen from convention, there will be no end of such fantastical writers as this Mr. Harris, who takes fustian for philosophy.' In * Part II. ch. vi. † Bréal, Bopp, Gram. Comp. II. xxviii. answer to the question Is not the Latin ibo an assertion?' he replies, Yes indeed is it, and in three letters: but those three letters contain three words: two verbs and a pronoun.' Bopp himself could not have enunciated the fact more decisively, and there is no doubt that, before the rise of Comparative Philology, Tooke's genius had led him to anticipate one of its most remarkable conclusions; but unfortunately, the arguments which he offered in proof of his position, were for the most part thoroughly erroneous. In asserting that case, gender, number, are no parts of a noun, and mood, tense, person, number, no parts of a verb, but in each instance separate words expressive of these accompanying circumstances-words whose separate signification has merely been lost sight of from their constant coalescence with the nouns or verbs-he was enunciating a discovery which should have won him immortal honour; but it seemed even easier to believe with Harris that they were purely artificial, than to believe (for instance) that ibo was a compound of i, Boúroμai, and ego. Hence, long afterwards, Schlegel considered that flexions were spontaneous creations of the intellect, and even Grimm spoke of them as a mysterious element. Horne Tooke was before his age. Everyone can speak of the many groundless hypotheses and demonstrable errors of the Diversions of Purley; but few have done justice to the eminent philological ability of its author. It has remained for a modern German* to admit that had Horne Tooke been acquainted with Sanskrit he might have taken a foremost position among the greatest of philologians. The discovery of that language demonstrated what he had conjectured. Then, secondly, the discovery of Sanskrit brought the intellect of Europe face to face with the intellect of Hindostan. Hitherto the education and culture of Europe had been almost solely Hellenistic, but now the modern world was to receive a new impulse from its contact with the grandeur, profundity, and calm of oriental thought. The rapture of Goethe— the subtlest and most cultivated intellect of Europe -on perusing the Sakuntalâ, will show how little† I exaggerate Willst du die Blüthe des frühern, die Früchte des späteren Jahres, The devotion to classical literature had, at the beginning of this century, been too long continued and too exclusive; it gave to the mind of Europe a development one-sided and therefore injurious. We had learnt to confine the very meaning of the word 'antiquity' to the history of Greece and Rome; but *Benfey, p. 310. Compare the enthusiastic language of M. Michelet on the Râmâyana: L'année 1863 me restera chère et bénie. C'est la première où j'ai pu lire le grand poëme sacré de l'Inde, le divin Râmâyana.-Bible de l'Humanité, p. 3. the discovery of Sanskrit revealed to us a wholly new chapter in the history of the world's youth: it enabled us to study the infancy of our race in the first gorgeous bloom of its imaginative passions. As Schlegel wisely prophesied, the study of oriental literature, to us so completely novel in structure and ideas, will, as we penetrate more deeply into it, bring back a new idea of the Divinity, and restore that vigour to the intellect, that truth and intensity of feeling to the soul, which invests all art, literature, and science with new and glorious life. Until the discovery of Sanskrit anything resembling a true philosophy of history was a thing impossible. Nor is this all; for the science of Comparative Mythology, which is of incalculable value for any history of the religions of mankind, and which has for the first time enabled us to see the inner significance of the old Greek and Roman theogonies with their vast circle of hitherto unintelligible legends, sprang immediately from the study of the sacred poems which were enshrined in this dead language of Hindostan.* Thirdly, and for the present lastly, the discovery of Sanskrit was fraught with results which may become unspeakably important to the English race. With all our energy and resourcefulness it must, I * This most memorable fact had not escaped the keen eye of Sir William Jones, who called attention to the 'striking similitude between the chief objects of worship' in Greece, Italy, and Hindostan.Asiat. Research. i. 224. |