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10 or, at any rate, saturated with religious ideas. Gods and demons, prayers and sacrifices, appear everywhere. This is not without parallel, to some extent, in Western literatures; but in these the religious element, without being suppressed, has come to be only one of many branches of writing, generally within the course of a few centuries from the birth of any given literature.

Secondly, it is astonishing to find in a literature of such antiquity and extent as that of India, an almost entire lack of anything worthy of the name of history. A foundation of historical truth, doubtless, underlies both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and, possibly, parts of some Puranas. There is, again, a poem called the Rajatarangini, which relates, in poetry, the history of the kings of Kashmere at a certain epoch. But the great Epics and the Rajatarangini are, at best, a very poor and distant equivalent for that solid work of historical prose which has played so great a part in every important Western literature and in that of Muhammedan kingdoms as well. That little or nothing of the kind appears in the best twenty-five centuries of Sanskrit literature is a phenomenon truly extraordinary. Hundreds of racy and interesting stories may be culled from Persian and Arabic historical works; and it is deeply to be regretted that, from its many centuries and its vast opportunities of observation, ancient Hindu literature has left us no similar sources of instruction and entertainment.

It would not be fair to pass from the subject without some notice of a feature of Hindu literature