It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself.  It asserts their health and independence of the experience of later times.  This pledge of sanity cannot be spared in a book, that it sometimes pleasantly reflect upon itself.  The story and fabulous portion of this book winds loosely from sentence to sentence as so many oases in a desert, and is as indistinct as a camel’s track between Mourzouk and Darfour.  It is a comment on the flow and freshet of modern books.  The reader leaps from sentence to sentence, as from one stepping-stone to another, while the stream of the story rushes past unregarded.  The Bhagvat-Geeta is less sententious and poetic, perhaps, but still more wonderfully sustained and developed.  Its sanity and sublimity have impressed the minds even of soldiers and merchants.  It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader.  To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveller may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

One of the most attractive of those ancient books that I have met with is the Laws of Menu.  According to Sir William Jones, “Vyasa, the son of Parasara, has decided that the Veda, with its Angas, or the six compositions deduced from it, the revealed system of medicine, the Puranas or sacred histories, and the code of Menu, were four works of supreme authority, which ought never to be shaken by arguments merely human.”  The last is believed by the Hindoos “to have been promulged in the beginning of time, by Menu, son or grandson of Brahma,” and “first of created beings”; and Brahma is said to have “taught his laws to Menu in a hundred thousand verses, which Menu explained to the primitive world in the very words of the book now translated.”  Others affirm that they have undergone successive abridgments for the convenience of mortals, “while the gods of the lower heaven and the band of celestial musicians are engaged in studying the primary code.”—­“A number of glosses or comments on Menu were composed by the Munis, or old philosophers, whose treatises, together with that before us, constitute the Dherma Sastra, in a collective sense, or Body of Law.”  Culluca Bhatta was one of the more modern of these.

Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul; but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the traveller, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan or Bagdat.  Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste.