Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/360

Rh in various forms, the fables and speculations of past ages. The amount of authorship shown to exist in the different districts, is a measure of the intellectual activity which, however now misdirected, might be employed for useful purposes. The same men who have wasted, and are still wasting, their learning and their powers in weaving complicated alliterations, recompounding absurd and vicious fictions, and revolving in perpetual circles of metaphysical abstractions—never ending, still beginning—have professed to me their readiness to engage in any sort of literary composition that would obtain the patronage of Government.”

Apart, then, altogether from the distorted views of moral and religious truth inculcated in the Sanskrit institutions and the perverted habits of mind contracted in acquiring them, we have Mr. Adam’s own distinct admission that both the teachers and the taught are only wasting their learning and their powers on what is utterly frivolous, or useless, or worse. In such a case, the more learned any man is, the more frivolous and useless do his labours become. And this is a fact, which Mr. Adam himself amply exemplifies in his third Report. He there recounts the literary achievements of the most learned men in the different districts. The most voluminous author he met with, was a native of Burdwan; of whose works he enumerates nearly forty. Of these, some are of great extent, such as the history of, written on 889 leaves or 1,776 pages, containing 30,000 slokas or metrical stanzas. The greater part of them relate to fabulous, mythological, or purely scholastic subjects. And amongst these, we find such rarities and ingenuities as the following;—a work on the praises of Vishnu and Shiva, so composed that every sloka has two senses, of which one is applicable to Vishnu and the other to Shiva—another, exhibiting a double sense, one expressing the praises of Shiva, and the other some different meaning—a third, containing the praises of Krishna, written in a species of alliteration by a repetition of the same sounds—a fourth, in question and answer, so framed that the answer to one question contains the answers to all the questions in the same sloka—a fifth, containing the praises of Radha and Krishna, and so framed that they may be read either backward or forward—a sixth, so framed that each sloka contains materials for 64 slokas by the transposition of each letter in succession from the beginning to the end, first the thirty-two syllable from the left to right, and afterwards the thirty-two from right to left, &c. &c. How forcibly may all this remind us of the dark ages in Europe—those ages of coarse taste and rude discernment, of laborious trifling and busy indolence—when the learned could find no better employment for their time and talents than in unceasingly spinning and weaving the most fantastic subtleties out of their own racked and wearied brains; and when one of the loftiest and most charac-