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 LECTUEE III.

HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERATURE.

MY first Lecture was intended to remove the prejudice that India is and always must be a strange country to us, and that those who have to live there will find themselves stranded, and far away from that living stream of thoughts and interests which carries us along in England and in other countries of Europe.

My second Lecture was directed against another prejudice, namely, that the people of India with whom the young Civil Servants will have to pass the best years of their life are a race so depraved morally, and more particularly so devoid of any regard for truth, that they must always remain strangers to us, and that any real fellowship or friendship with them is quite out of the question.

To-day I shall have to grapple with a third prejudice, namely, that the literature of India, and more especially the classical Sanskrit literature, whatever may be its interest to the scholar and the antiquarian, has little to teach us which we cannot learn better from other sources, and that at all events it is of little practical use to young civilians. If only they learn to express themselves in Hindustani or Tamil, that is considered quite enough; nay, as they have