Sanskrit And The Vedas.[138]
“But in justice, I am bound to say that Rome has the merit of having first seriously attended to the study of Indian literature.”—Cardinal Wiseman: Connection between Science and Revealed Religion.
“The first missionaries who succeeded in rousing the attention of European scholars to the extraordinary discovery (Sanskrit literature) that had been made were the French Jesuit missionaries.”—Max Müller: Lectures on the Science of Language.
What manner of language is the Sanskrit?
By what people or nation was it spoken?
When? and where?
What are its literary monuments?
Whence comes it—granting it to be as ancient a tongue as is represented—that neither in Greek, Roman, nor, indeed, in any ancient literature, is it ever mentioned, and that we only read of it in modern works, scarce a century old?
Such questions as these are frequently asked, even at the present day. Forty years ago, it is doubtful if there were ten persons in this country able to reply to them satisfactorily, and more than doubtful if [pg 323] a single scholar could have been found capable of translating the simplest Sanskrit sentence. Within that period, however, philological science in general, and Sanskrit in particular, have made long and rapid strides among us, and we now have scores of scholars fully awake to the importance of cultivating the resources of this wonderful tongue, as the origin or common source of the European family of languages, in which our own English is included.