Page:The Renaissance In India.djvu/28

 and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf. Nor was all this coiossal literatare con-tined to philosophy and thleology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and gram-mar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences ; it embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing, all the sitty-four accomplishments, ever-thiug then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind, even, for in-stance, to such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants, each of which had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of tech-nical terms, its copious literature. In each subject from the largest and most mementous to the smallest and most trivial there was expended the same all-embracing, opulent, minute and thorough intellectuality. On one side there is an insatiable curiosity, the desire of life to know itself in every detail, on the other a spirit of organisation and scrupulous