IT T is a maxim in the fcience of legiflation and government, that laws are of no avail without manners; or, to explain the fentence more fully, that the best intended legiflative provifions would have no beneficial effect even at firft, and none at all in a fhort course of time, unless they were congenial to the difpofition and habits, to the religious prejudices, and approved immemorial usages, of the people, for whom they were enacted; especially if that people univerfally and fincerely believed, that all their ancient ufages and established rules of conduct had the fanction of an actual revelation from heaven: the legiflature of Britain having fhown, in compliance with this maxim, an intention to leave the natives of these Indian provinces in poffeffion of their own laws, at leaft on the titles of contracts and inheritances, we may humbly prefume that that all future provifions, for the adminiftration of justice and government in India, will be conformable, as far as the natives are affected by them, to the manners and opinions of the natives themselves; an object, which cannot poffibly be attained, until thofe manners and opinions can be fully and accurately known. Thefe confiderations, and a few others more immediately within my own province, were my principal motives for wifhing to know, and have induced me at length to publifh, that fyftem of duties, religious and civil, and of law in all its branches, which the Hindus firmly believe to have been promulged by MENU, fon or grandfon of BRAHMA; or, in plain language, the first of created beings, and not the oldeft only, but the holieft of legiflators; a fyftem fo comprehenfive and fo minutely exact, that it may be confidered as the Inftitutes of Hindu Law, preparatory to the copious Digest, which has lately been compiled by Pandits of eminent learning, and introductory perhaps to a Code, which may fupply the many natural defects in the old jurisprudence of this country, and without any deviation from its principles, accommodate it juftly to the improvement of a commercial age. WE are loft in an inextricable labyrinth of aftronomical cycles, Yugas, Mabáyugas, Calpas, and Menwantanas, in attempting to calculate the time, when the first MENU, according to the Brahmens, governed this world, and became the progenitors of mankind, who from him are called mánaráh, nor can we, fo clouded are the old history and chrono Ff3 logy logy of India with fables and allegories, afcertain the precife age, when the work, now presented to the public, was actually compofed; but we are in poffeffion of fome evidence, partly extrinfick and and partly internal, that it is really one of the oldeft compofitions exifting. From a text of PARA'SARA, difcovered by Mr. DAVIS, it appears, that the vernal equinox had gone back from the tenth degree of Bbanani to the first of Afwinì, or twentythree degrees and twenty minutes, between the days of that Indian philofopher, and the year of our Lord 499, when it coincided with the origin of the Hindu ecliptic; fo that PARA'SARA probably flourished near the clofe of the twelfth century before CHRIST: NOW PARA'SARA was the grandfon of another fage, named VASI'SHT'HA, who is often mentioned in the laws of MENU, and once as contemporary with the divine BHRIGU himfelf; but the character of BHRIGU, and the whole dramatical arrangement of the book before us, are clearly fictitious and ornamental, with a defign, too common among ancient lawgivers, of ftamping authority on the work by the introduction of fupernatural perfonages, though VASI'SHT'HA may have lived many generations before the actual writer of it; who names him, indeed, in one or two places as a philofopher in an earlier period. The ftyle, however, and metre of this work (which there is not the smallest reason to think affectedly obfolete) are widely different from the language and metrical rules of CA'LIDA's, who unquestionably wrote be fore fore the beginning of our æra; and the dialect of MENU is even obferved in many paffages to refemble that of the Véda, particularly in a departure from the more modern grammatical forms; whence it muft at first view feem very probable, that the laws, now brought to light, were confiderably older than those of SOLON or even of LYCURGUS, although the promulgation of them, before they were reduced to writing, might have been coeval with the firft monarchies eftablished in Egypt or Afia: but, having had the fingular good fortune to procure ancient copies of eleven Upanishads with a very perfpicuous comment, I am enabled to fix with more exactness the probable age of the work before us, and even to limit its highest poffible age, by a mode of reafoning, which may be thought new, but will be found, I perfuade myfelf, fatisfactory, if the publick fhall on this occafion give me credit for a few very curious facts, which, though capable of ftrict proof, can at prefent be only af ferted. The Sanferit of the three firft Védas, (I need not here speak of the fourth,) that of the Mánava, Dherma, Sáftra, and that of the Puránas, differ from each other in pretty exact proportion to the Latin of NUMA, from whofe laws entire fentences are preferved, that of APPIUs, which we fee in the fragments of the Twelve Tables, and that of CICERO, or of LUCRETIUS, where he has not affected an obsolete ftyle: if the feveral changes, therefore, of Sanferit and Latin, took place, as we may fairly affume, in times very nearly proportional, the Vé das must have been written about 300 years before thefe Inftitutes, and about 600 before the Puránas and Itihafas, which I am fully convinced were not the productions of VYA'SA; fo that if the fon of PARA'SARA Committed the traditional Védas to writing in the Sanferit of his father's time, the original of this book must have received its prefent form about 880 years before CHRIST's birth. If the texts, indeed, which VYA'SA collected, had been actually written, in a much older dialect, by the fages preceding him, we must enquire into the greatest poffible age of the Védas themselves: now one of the longest and finest Upanishads in the second Véda contains three lifts, in a regular feries upwards, of at most forty-two pupils and preceptors, who fucceffively received and tranfmitted (probably by oral tradition) the doctrine contained in that Upanishad; and as the old Indian priefts were ftudents at fifteen, and inftructors at twentyfive, we cannot allow more than ten years on an average for each interval between the refpective traditions; whence, as there are forty fuch intervals, in two of the lifts between VYA'SA, who arranged the whole work, and AYA'SYA, who is extolled at the beginning of it, and just as many, in the third lift, between the compiler, and YA'JNYAWALCYA, who makes the principal figure in it, we find the highest age of the Yajur Véda to be 1580 years before the birth of our Saviour, (which would make it older than the five books of MOSES) and that of our Indian law tract about 1280 years before |