compares it,
both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of
Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke's and Hobbes's books of Philosophy,
Blackstone's _Commentaries,_ Percy's Ballads, and the writings
of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,--all done into blank verse and
incorporated with _Paradise Lost._ You have a martial poem like
the _Iliad,_ full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and
blazonry of war;--and you find the _Bhagavad-Gita_ a chapter in
it. Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions
to it: Whosever fancy it struck would add a book or two, with
new incidents to glorify this or that locality, princely house,
or hero. And it is hard to separate these accretions from the
original,--from the version, that is, that first appeared as an
epic poem. Some are closely bound into the story, so as to be
almost integral; some are fairly so; some might be cut out and
never missed. Hence the vast bulk and promiscuity of material;
which might militate against your finding in it, as a whole, any
consistent Soul-symbol. And yet its chief personages seem all
real men; they are clearly drawn, with firm lines;--says Mr.
Dutt, as clearly as the Trojan and Achaean chiefs of Homer.
Yudhishthira and Karna and Arjuna; Bhishma and Drona and the
wild Duhsasan, are very living characters;--as if they had been
actual men who had impressed themselves on the imagination of the
age, and were not to be drawn by anyone who drew them except from
the life. That might imply that poets began writing about them
not so long after they lived, and while the memory of them and of
their deeds was fresh. We are to understand, however,--all India
has so understood, always,--that the poem is a Soul-symbol,
standing for the wars of Light and Darkness; whether this
symbol was a tradition firmly in the minds of all who wrote it,
or whether it was imposed by the master-hand that collated their
writings into an epic for the first time.

For it would seem that of the original writers, some had been on
the Kurava, some on the Pandava side; though in the symbol as it
stands, it is the Pandavas who represent the Light, the Kurava,--
the darkness. There are traces of this submerged diversity of
opinion. Just as in the _Iliad_ it is the Trojan Hector who is
the most sympathetic character, so in the _Mahabharata_ it is
often to some of the Kurava champions that our sympathies
unavoidably flow. We are told that the Kurava are thoroughly