his reconciliation of the conflicting principles is not found in that despairful materialism in which the Hebrew thinker watches with anguish all individual distinctions, nay, even the differences between men and brutes, disappear; it is found in a pantheistic moral ideal—that Nirvana, "Cessation," absorption of the individual into the universal soul, which is only to be reached by a personal life of moral excellence. M. Guizot has remarked that the general acceptance of feudalism in Europe is the best evidence of its necessity; perhaps a similar remark may be made on the rapid extension of Buddhism, which at least shows that Bráhmanism in its early exclusive form had worn out the prestige of its pretensions. Buddhism, about 257 B.C., became a State religion; and though, after 800 A.D., Bráhmanism again gradually became the ruling religion, five hundred millions of Buddhists in Asia venerate to-day the memory of Gautama, "the Enlightened."
§ 81. It was during the domination of Buddhism that Sanskrit literature displayed its nearest approach to a popular form in its drama. But before we touch upon this form of Sanskrit literature we must briefly review another—the epic. Perhaps the earliest traces of the Indian epic may be carried as far back as the Veda; certain it is, as Professor Monier Williams has said, that not only is the germ of many legends in Hindu epic poetry to be found in the Rig-Veda, but such poetry is there foreshadowed in hymns and songs laudatory of Indra and other gods supposed to protect the Aryan from the non-Aryan races. In fact, when we remember the dramatic shape of the hymn quoted above, it is allowable to say that lyric, epic, and dramatic elements are all to be found in the Rig-Veda. But, dismissing the question of the exact process by which Indian epic
