and style of all periods, became prevalent in literature, the confusion became still greater." It can be easily understood how the classical language of India, likewise, in its conflict with a great variety of local dialects, came to depend more on the verbal criticism of grammarians than on that creative originality which in our days of national languages, stereotyped by the aid of printing and widely diffused education, is rightly accounted so much more valuable than the study of words.
But, besides the universal idea of humanity and the critical study of language as the medium of sacred books or models of literary art, there is a third characteristic of world-literature which to our modern European minds is perhaps the most interesting. This is the rise of new æsthetic appreciations of physical nature and its relations to man. Among the Hebrews and Arabs, it is true, we cannot observe this characteristic of world-literature so distinctly as elsewhere. For the Hebrews the idea of Yâhveh was so closely connected with physical conceptions—sunshine, storm, rain, lightning, thunder—that the sights and sounds of Nature were scarcely realisable save through the creator-god of his peculiar people. The Allâh of the Arabs is even a closer approach to that One Unhuman Power which modern science tends to reduce into an Impersonal Force; moreover, the Arabs, while, like the Hebrews, prevented from treating Nature as distinct from the Deity, found the proper subjects of their literature within the limits of the Qurʾân's language and ideas. But in India, China, Greece, and Italy it was otherwise. Indian poetry, for example, through the medium of its polytheistic religion, could deify physical nature without offending religious feelings. The myths of early Greece had been closely connected with physical nature; and, though the city
