that the Brahman narrator (Kathaka) should
interpret the old poem, but there must be some few people present who
understand, or imagine they understand, the old poetry of Vyasa and
Valmiki.

There are thousands of Brahmans[95] even now, when so little
inducement exists for Vedic studies, who know the whole of the
Rig-Veda by heart and can repeat it; and what applies to the Rig-Veda
applies to many other books.

But even if Sanskrit were more of a dead language than it really is,
all the living languages of India, both Aryan and Dravidian, draw
their very life and soul from Sanskrit.[96] On this point, and on the
great help that even a limited knowledge of Sanskrit would render in
the acquisition of the vernaculars, I, and others better qualified
than I am, have spoken so often, though without any practical effect,
that I need not speak again. Any candidate who knows but the elements
of Sanskrit grammar will well understand what I mean, whether his
special vernacular may be Bengali, Hindustani, or even Tamil. To a
classical scholar I can only say that between a civil servant who
knows Sanskrit and Hindustani, and another who knows Hindustani only,
there is about the same difference in their power of forming an
intelligent appreciation of India and its inhabitants, as there is
between a traveller who visits Italy with a knowledge of Latin, and a
party personally conducted to Rome by Messrs. Cook & Co.

Let us examine, however, the objection that Sanskrit literature is a
dead or an artificial literature, a little more carefully, in order to
see whether there is not some kind of truth in it. Some people hold
that the literary works which we possess in Sanskrit never had any
real life at all, that they were altogether scholastic productions,
and that therefore they can teach us nothing of what we really care
for, namely, the historical growth of the Hindu mind. Others maintain
that at the present moment, at all events, and after a century of
English rule, Sanskrit literature has ceased to be a motive power in
India, and that it can teach us nothing of what is passing now through
the Hindu mind and influencing it for good or for evil.

Let us look at the facts. Sanskrit literature is a wide and a vague
term. If the Vedas, such as we now have them, were composed about 1500
B.C., and if it is a fact that considerable works continue to be
written in Sanskrit even now, we have before us a stream of literary
activity extendi