most honoured, wherever that nation dwelt; and we should think the least of those who had lost all notion of the skill it required to invent them, and spoiled them by their own listlessness. And see, Rádhákánt, how in all this I keep to one sense-the sense of hearing; which is the one chiefly concerned in all musical matters, as well as in the transmission of sacred truth.

RAD. But is not the same true of sight likewise? LAUR. Some men have thought so in regard to one other most useful invention, which has tended to fix down, and give a visible and permanent form to what existed first in sound only. I mean the invention of letters. For as all the letters of the different parts of India may be traced to the Devanágari, so some one has thought that the letters of the whole world may be shown to have in them affinities and similarities (17), when you arrive at the intervening links which explain how one came from another; and although I only know of one nation (18) who have any record, that can be depended upon, of the invention of its alphabet, even that nation had one or two alphabets to build upon; so that I cannot say anyway more of this outward form into which things conveyed by hearing have thrown themselves, than of the songs and instruments yielding divers sounds, that they were ever invented entirely and throughout without some foundation to begin upon (19). And I hold, that as this was the case in common knowledge of sundry kinds, so was it the

case also in revealed knowledge. One nation kept it up more purely than the rest; still all drew from one original tradition, and when this tradition ceased to be oral, and came to be written, then according as each nation had been faithful to the original tradition, its written documents tallied with the written document of the nation, which in sacred things holds the place that our inventor of music does in common things. And the nation which had most faithfully kept up the oral tradition had also fresh written tradition given to it. And (20) the writers of this fresh revelation were not taught it all at once, without any previous knowledge of the existing discoveries of the Divine will, but after it. And though the Western nations were so miserably off that they had (21) no Scriptures at all to look up to, yet this was not the case in the East, e. g. in China or India, where the old oral tradition was early committed to writing; was reverenced by all the virtuous, and guarded by an order of men believed to have been divinely set apart for that purpose.

RAD. Then you would have me believe that the Vedas came from oral tradition, and were not revealed to Vyasa?

LAUR. Is not the common name of S'rúti a proof that they came by hearing, from some other quarter, whatever difficulty may exist as to the precise meaning of the term? For Sankara says (22) that he who knows the Vedas, does not set about any arbitrary interpretation of them, but has recourse to his Guru,

who knows the eternal and true Purusha, and hath him in his mind. Yet, as the Mundaka Upanishad teaches, he learned it from some other; and the Chandogya Upanishad says that if there were no speech, then it would be impossible to distinguish right from wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil, friend and foe. Speech, it says, makes the Rich and other Vedas to be known (23). The most ancient account seems, then, to be, that they were received from tradition, and so that they were not born by the river Saraswati, but came from some other quarter. As far as any tradition about them goes, they came from the north of India, not from the south: they came, therefore, from that part of India which is nearest to that in which, as our sacred books tell us, the human race was first dispersed abroad.

RAD. You have told me that you think the Vedas were the offspring of collected traditions, and that those traditions came from some country further off, and that in this last country the human race first took its rise. But you have not said how far you think they kept up that tradition in a pure form. When you spoke of the musical instruments travelling from one nation to another, you remind me of the Chhandas, which is necessary in order to the right reading of the Vedas; but you at the same time also suggested, that as in regard to musical instruments (24), so in regard to sacred truth, some nations through want of right discernment, perverted it. Now how far have the sacred music of the Vedas,

their accents, and their singing, kept the doctrine also pure?

LAUR. That, Rádhákánt, is a very wide question, and one which cannot be easily answered; yet I will attempt such an answer as may be in my power. My belief that Vyasa and others received the sacred learning by the sense of hearing, be it remembered, does not imply that I deny that there was some gift of a supernatural kind likewise necessary, in order to lead him to arrange them as he did, or to give him guidance in retaining this or dropping that, so as to make the book serve the ends for which it was designed. Now if you wish to know of what precise kind this supernatural power was, I will tell you what an ancient tradition reports concerning it. After a time men on earth grew wicked, and a flood was sent to punish them; only a few were saved, and they all spoke one language, but as they availed themselves of this for unholy purposes, they lost this oneness of speech; and though a slight resemblance is traceable in languages of the most remote nations, still they were all divided; and the tradition says it was into seventy-two different nations, according to the number of the angels of God. Thus, besides the outward and visible governors of nations, there were certain angels set over them (25). Hence there was a prince of Persia, and a prince of Tyre, and a prince of the Jewish people, among these angels. And according as the angels were mighty or not, they obtained blessings for their nations. Thus the Jews received

the Law by the disposition of angels, and so other nations may, according to this tradition, have retained different amounts of true doctrine. And wherever we find true doctrine to have been kept up, there we may suppose an angel to have interfered, and to have been the messenger of true knowledge.

RAD. But what are these angels?

LAUR. They are ministering spirits who wait upon the most high God to execute his commands.

RAD. And do you really believe that the Vedas were inspired by one of them, in so far as the invisible and unseen part of the revelation is concerned?

LAUR. I only said it might have been, that so far as they kept up the truth, a good angel interfered in order to secure to them that amount of truth which they have preserved. But it will be more important for us to consider the external than the internal means of the revelation. We have already made some advances towards showing that the ancient doctrines of your countrymen came from the country of Cashmere, and so probably from some country still further off, which was nearer to the primitive seat of the ancient tradition. And how long your countrymen kept up a communication with this source of primitive tradition I will not venture to determine; though the fact that there is no mention of incarnations in the Vedas, may be perhaps taken to look as if they had had communication with the old centre of traditions mediately, or immediately after Vyasa's time.