Page:Narrative of a journey through the upper provinces of India etc. (Volume III.).djvu/403

Rh retain I can only judge from translations, and they certainly do not seem to me worth picking out of the rubbish under which they were sinking. Some of the poetry of the Mahabarat I am told is good, and I think a good deal of the Ramayuna pretty. But no work has yet been produced which even pretends to be authentic history. No useful discoveries in science are, I believe, so much as expected; and I have no great sympathy with those students who value a worthless tract merely because it calls itself old, or a language which teaches nothing, for the sake of its copiousness and intricacy. If I were to run wild after oriental learning I should certainly follow that of the Mussulmans, whose histories seem really very much like those of Europe, and whose poetry, so far as I am yet able to judge, has hardly had justice done to it in the ultra flowery translations which have appeared in the West. But after all, I will own that my main quarrel with the institutions which I have noticed, is their needless and systematic exclusion of the Gospels, since they not only do less good than they might have done, but are actually, in my opinion, productive of serious harm, by awakening the dormant jealousy of the native against the schools which pursue a different system.

During my long journey through the northern half of this vast country, I have paid all the attention I could spare to a topic on which bitterly reproves the English for their inattention to, the architectural antiquities of Hindostan. I had myself heard much of these before I set out, and