determined dialect. Other Sanskrit scholars have proposed other
solutions of this strange mixture of correct prose and incorrect
poetry in the Buddhist literature; but none of them was satisfactory.
The problem seems to have been solved at last by a native scholar,
Babu Rajendralal, a curious instance of the reaction of European
antiquarian research on the native mind of India. Babu Rajendralal
reads Sanskrit of course with the greatest ease. He is a pandit by
profession, but he is at the same time a scholar and critic in our
sense of the word. He has edited Sanskrit texts after a careful
collation of MSS., and in his various contributions to the 'Journal of
the Asiatic Society of Bengal,' he has proved himself completely above
the prejudices of his class, freed from the erroneous views on the
history and literature of India in which every Brahman is brought up,
and thoroughly imbued with those principles of criticism which men
like Colebrooke, Lassen, and Burnouf have followed in their researches
into the literary treasures of his country. His English is remarkably
clear and simple, and his arguments would do credit to any Sanskrit
scholar in England. We quote from his remarks on Burnouf's account of
the Gathas, as given in that scholar's 'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien:'

'Burnouf's opinion on the origin of the Gathas, we venture
to think, is founded on a mistaken estimate of Sanskrit
style. The poetry of the Gatha has much artistic elegance
which at once indicates that it is not the composition of
men who were ignorant of the first principles of grammar.
The authors display a great deal of learning, and discuss
the subtlest questions of logic and metaphysics with much
tact and ability, and it is difficult to conceive that men
who were perfectly familiar with the most intricate forms of
Sanskrit logic, who have expressed the most abstruse
metaphysical ideas in precise and often in beautiful
language, who composed with ease and elegance in Arya,
To_t_aka, and other difficult measures, were unacquainted
with the rudiments of the language in which they wrote, and
were unable to conjugate the verb to be in all its forms....
The more reasonable conjecture appears to be that the Gatha
is the production of bards who were contemporaries or
immediate successors of _S_akya, who recounted to the devout
congregations of the prophet of Ma