It was Schlegel's intention to have given a complete history of Greek poetry; but the execution of this task was abandoned, not from any want of perseverance, as some have imagined, but from some peculiar circumstances in the world of letters at that period. The literary scepticism of Wolf, supported with so much learning and ability, was then convulsing the German mind; and while the purity of the Homeric text, and the unity and integrity of the Homeric poems themselves were so ably contested, Schlegel deemed it a hazardous task to attempt to draw public attention to any æsthetic enquiries on the elder Greek poetry. Hence the second part of this work, which treats of the lyric poets, remained unfinished. The general qualities, which must strike all in this history of Greek poetry are, a masterly acquaintance with classical literature--a wariness and circumspection of judgment, rare in any writer, especially in one so young--a critical perspicacity, that draws its conclusions from the widest range of observation--and a poetic flexibility of fancy, that can transport itself into the remotest periods of antiquity. In a word, the author analyzes as a critic, feels as a poet, and observes like a philosopher.
But a new career now expanded before the ardent mind of Schlegel. The enterprising spirit of British scholars had but twenty years before opened a new intellectual world to European inquiry:--a world many of whose spiritual productions, disguised in one shape or another, the Western nations had for a long course of ages admired and enjoyed, ignorant as they were of the precise region from which they were brought. For the knowledge of the Sanscrit tongue and literature--an event in literary importance inferior only to the revival of Greek learning, and in a religious and philosophic point of view, pregnant, perhaps, with greater results;--mankind have been indebted to the influence of British commerce; and it is not one of the least services which that commerce has rendered to the cause of civilization. In the promotion of Sanscrit learning, the merchant princes of Britain emulated the noble zeal displayed four centuries before by the merchant princes of Florence, in the encouragement and diffusion of Hellenic literature. By dint of promises and entreaties, they extorted from the Brahmin the mystic key, which has opened to us so many wonders of the primitive world. And as a great Christian philosopher of our age[2] has observed, it is fortunate that India was not then under the dominion of the French; for during the irreligious fever which inflamed and maddened that great people, their insidious guides--those detestable sophists of the eighteenth century--would most assuredly have leagued with the Brahmins to suppress the truth, to mutilate the ancient monuments of Sanscrit lore, and thus would have for ever poisoned the sources of Indian learning. A British society was established at Calcutta--whose object it was to investigate the languages, historical antiquities, sciences, and religious and philosophical systems of Asia, and more especially of Hindostan. Sir William Jones--a name that will be revered as long as genius, learning, and Christian philosophy command the respect of mankind--was the soul of this enterprise. He brought to the investigation of Indian literature and history, a mind stored with the treasures of classical and oriental scholarship--a spirit of indefatigable activity--and a clear, methodical and capacious intellect. No man, too, so fully understood the religious bearings of these inquiries, and had so well seized the whole subject of Asiatic antiquities in its connection with the Bible. But at the period at which we have arrived, this great spirit had already taken its departure; nor in its flight had it dropped its mantle of inspiration on any of the former associates of its labours. For among the academicians of Calcutta, though there were men of undoubted talent and learning, there were none who inherited the philosophic mind of Jones. At this period, too, the fanciful temerity of a Wilford was bringing discredit on the Indian researches--a temerity which would necessarily provoke a re-action, and lead, as in some recent instances, to a prosaic narrow-mindedness, that would seek to bring down the whole system of Indian civilization to the dull level of its own vulgar conceptions.