Will add new pleasure to the Colorado offers nothing more beautiful than the journey through Delaware Water Gap and Blue Ridge Ranges. NEW YORK-BUFFALO CHICAGO-ST. LOUIS. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. No. 390.-APRIL, 1902. Art. I.-THE SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. THERE are few things more interesting in the history of nineteenth-century scholarship than the career of Professor Max Müller. The first mention of his name by an English writer of repute which we remember to have seen, occurs in the' Boyle Lectures' of Frederick Denison Maurice on the 'Religions of the World'-a volume accounted, not unjustly, when it appeared in 1846, a very significant sign of the times. In the passage to which we refer, Maurice indicates the chief helps-very scanty ones-' which the Western student possesses for a knowledge of the earliest Hindu faith,' and goes on to welcome the addition to them which might be expected from a young German, now in London, whose knowledge of Sanskrit is profound, and his industry plus quam Germanica, and who has it in contemplation to publish and translate all the Vedas.' That young German was Max Müller, who soon made full proof of the endowments with which Maurice credited him. He did not, indeed, 'publish and translate all the Vedas,' but he gave to the world a complete edition of the Rig-Veda, together with the gloss of Sayana, by far the most authoritative of the commentators; and in the series of the 'Sacred Books of the East,' now before us, we have English versions from his pen of some of the more striking and valuable portions of Vedic literature. But this is only a small part of the world's debt to what Maurice aptly called 'his industry Vol. 195.-No. 390. 2 A |