FOREWORD III
The most brilliant age in Tamil literature, the so-called Sangam Age, came to a close at the downfall of the three Tamil Dynasties, and was succeeded by dark ages which continued all through the long period of anarchy and misrule in Southern India. It was after the advent of Europeans in general, and European Christian Missionaries in par- ticular, that the revival of Tamil letters began.
When Europeans realised that the best way of knowing and influencing the Tamil people, among whom they came to live and work, was through the knowledge of their language, they applied themselves closely to the study of Tamil. They found it was a noble language with a noble literature, but was generally neglected by its people, mainly by reason of its literary dialect being almost entirely poetical, and so dif- ferent from the spoken dialect, that one, who could read and write the language as spoken, could not even divide a line of poetry into its component words, unless one had made a special study of it for years.
So they seem to have thought it their first duty to try to open the eyes of the Tamils to the greatness of their language. With this object in view, many of them have expressed their opinion of Tamil, its litera- ture, and grammar. Their opinions are very useful and interesting, but we have space here only for a few of them.
First, as regards the language: Dr. Winslow writes, "It is not perhaps extravagant to say that in its poetic from the Tamil is more polished and exact than the Greek, and, in both dialects, with its bor- rowed treasures, more copious than the Latin. In its fulness and power, it more resembles English and German than any other living language." Dr. Schimid writes of Tamil that "the mode of collocating its words follows the logical or intellectual order more so than even the Latin or
