ABSTRACT
It is refreshing to find in Mr. More's little volume of epigrams a book on India which is at once scholarly and attractive to the general reader. The new Renaissance to which Schopenhauer looked forward as a result of the study of Sanskrit, has found as yet but scant expression in literature. For a century past German scholars have hewn from Sanskrit huge blocks of erudition, but there has been no successful attempt —except perhaps in the stanzas of Riickert — to extract from this crude ore of scholarship its residue of human wisdom and experience. Yet the problem raised by the meeting in India of the two extremes of Aryan civilization, of English and Hindu, and by the slow infiltration of Indian thought into the West, is in itself of real interest to all thinking men. Mr. More has rendered a service to those who wish to reflect on the larger aspects of the question by attempting to give in brief compass a faithful image of the ideals of ancient India. He has only in rare instances used his Sanskrit originals as a background on which to embroider his own poetical fancies, nor has he, like FitzGerald, read into them any of the moods of the modern agnostic.
