Hazlitt, Macaulay and The Indian Jugglers

The few Indian readers that I have are probably less in number than the metals that make up the amalgam (panchaloha) used in sacred vessels. The gold and silver are drawn to my advaitic rambling, the baser metals hope to get an idea that they can use in a paper on Hazlitt’s essay On the Feeling of Immortality in Early Youth. Oh ye deluded ones lost in the mists of Maya. I allude to both groups but here I concentrate on those of a Macaulayist tendency:

It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.

(Thomas Babington Macaulay: 1835 Minute on Indian Education)

If ‘Immortality’ is the only one of Hazlitt’s essays that you have read then your English medium education will merely befit you to be an engineer. May I suggest that you next read the essay in Table Talk called The Indian Jugglers.

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hazlitt/william/table-talk/