If we consider the political and social state of that country, we can easily understand what would happen in a case of invasion and conquest by a warlike race. The invaders would take possession of the strongholds or castles, and either remove the old Rajahs, or make them their vassals and agents. Everything else would then go on exactly as before. The rents would be paid, the taxes collected, and the life of the villagers, that is, of the great majority of the people of India, would go on almost undisturbed by the change of government. The only people who might suffer would be, or, at all events, might be the priestly caste, unless they should come to terms with the new conquerors. The priestly caste, however, was also to a great extent the literary caste, and the absence of their old patrons, the native Rajahs, might well produce for a time a complete cessation of literary activity. The rise of Buddhism and its formal adoption by King Asoka had already considerably shaken the power and influence of the old Brahmanic hierarchy. The Northern conquerors, whatever their religion may have been, were certainly not believers in the Veda. They seem to have made a kind of compromise with Buddhism, and it is probably due to that compromise, or to an amalgamation of _S_aka legends with Buddhist doctrines, that we owe the so-called Mahâyâna form of Buddhism--and more particularly the Amitâbha worship--which was finally settled at the Council under Kanishka, one of the Turanian rulers of India in the first century A.D. If then we divide the whole of Sanskrit literature into these two periods, the one anterior to the great Turanian invasion, the other posterior to it, we may call the literature of the former period _ancient_ and _natural_, that of the latter _modern_ and _artificial_. Of the former period we possess, _first_, what has been called the _Veda_, _i.e._, Knowledge, in the widest sense of the word--a considerable mass of literature, yet evidently a wreck only, saved out of a general deluge; _secondly_, the works collected in the Buddhist Tripi_t_aka, now known to us chiefly in what is called the Pâli dialect, the Gâthâ dialects, and Sanskrit, and probably much added to in later times. The second period of Sanskrit literature comprehends everything else. Both periods may be subdivided again, but this does not concern us at present.