in the relation of miracle-plays to the modern European drama. So, also, the Mahábhárata contains "many more illustrations of domestic and social life and manners than the more ancient epic."
But while such differences as these present themselves in a comparison of the two great Indian epics, differences to be regarded as indicating literary sympathies gradually widening beyond the narrow circle of Bráhmanic interests and expanding towards a width sufficient for the creation of a drama under royal patronage, the European scholar will probably contrast with greater interest the Indian with our own European epics, especially the Iliad and Odyssey. A vast range of human interests, diversities of language and race, varieties and sharp contrasts of caste, consciousness of intricate distinctions in social life, will account for the disorderly universalism of the Indian epics compared with the far greater uniformity but also narrowly local interests of the Greek. If in the Iliad time, place, action, are restricted within comparatively narrow limits, if even the wider circle of the Odyssey is insignificant compared with the almost unbounded range of the Mahábhárata, the social and physical differences under which the Indian and Greek poets lived are amply sufficient to explain their diverse treatment of time, place, and action, a diversity which we shall find repeated in the Greek and Sanskrit dramas. Just as the similes of the Indian epics are taken from the movements of Asiatic animals—the tiger, the elephant—or from the peculiar aspects of Indian plants, the Sanskrit dictionary itself marking the profusion of Indian flowers by the number of its botanical terms, so graphic and picturesque descriptions of scenery, alike in the epics and dramas of India, reflect not only "the whole appearance of external nature in the East,
