ballads. His form is entirely changed, and he is received as master of the horse' at the court of Ayodhya, or Oude. King Bhima, distressed at the loss of his daughter, traces out her retreat by means of some wandering Brahmins. She returns home, and after some time, in order to discover the retreat of Nala, proclaims her intention of holding another Swayambara, that she may proceed to a second marriage, the worst offence against female propriety*, especially in a lady of her rank.

Rituparna, the King of Oude, determines to become a candidate for the princess, and sets forth with his charioteer-the disguised Nala. This king was gifted with so wonderful a faculty of calculation, that he could count the fruits upon a tree as he drove rapidly under it. Nala was no less distinguished for his unrivalled management of horses. They mutually communicate their secrets; and Nala thus, already dispossessed by the wicked spirit, becomes more than a match for match for any gamester. As they enter the city of King Bhima, Damajanti recognizes the sound of her husband's trampling steeds-his driving could not be mistaken by her ear.

All her heart was thrilled with wonder, as she heard the welcome sound;

On they seemed to come, as Nala drove of yore his trampling steeds; Damajanti heard and trembled at the old familiar sound.

On the palace roof the peacocks, th' elephants within their stalls, And the coursers heard the rolling of the mighty monarch's car. Peacocks, elephants, the trampling of the fiery coursers heard; Up they raised their necks and clamoured, as at sound of coming rain. Damajanti employs every artifice to discover her husband. She suspects the charioteer, about whom all is wonderful and miraculous. The gates rise or expand to let him in; self-kindled fire is ever ready at his call; the water flows towards him when he is in want of it. Her suspicions are still further excited by a whimsical incident. She procures some of his food, and recognizes the wellknown flavour of her husband's cookery. This is Indian, what follows is universal nature. By her handmaid, she sends her children to him.

'Soon as he young Indrasena and her little brother saw,

Up he sprang, his arms wound round them, to his bosom folding both
When he gazed upon the children, like the children of the gods,
All his heart o'erflowed with pity, and unwilling tears brake forth.
Yet Nischadha's lord perceiving that she marked his strong emotion,
From his hold released the children, and to Cesina he spake.
Oh! so like mine own twin children was yon lovely infant pair,
Seeing them thus unexpected, have I broken out in tears.'

Second marriages are prohibited by the laws of Menu; and hence, no doubt, one

great motive to the performance of the Suttee.

Damajanti

Damajanti contrives an interview, and questions the mysterious charioteer :

• Hast thou ever seen, Mahaka, an upright and noble man, Who departed, and abandoned in the wood his wife that slept,The beloved wife and blameless,-in the wild wood worn with grief? Him, who was my chosen husband-him, for whom I scorned the gods; Could he leave the true, the loving-her that hath his children borne?' Nala can conceal himself no longer; but the jealous thought that his wife was about to commit the faithless and indecorous offence of taking a second husband, rankles in his heart, and he rebukes her with sternness. Damajanti adjures the wind, the sun, and the moon, to bear witness that she was guiltless of any such design, and only employed the innocent artifice to win back her lord. 'He through all the world that wanders, witness the all-seeing Wind, Let him now of life bereave me, if in this 'gainst thee I've sinned. And the Sun that ever moveth o'er the bosom of the deep, Let him now of life bereave me, if in this 'gainst thee I've sinned. Witness, too, the Moon that travels through the midst of all the World;

Let her, too, of life bereave me, if in this 'gainst thee I've sinned. These three gods are those that govern the three worlds-so let them speak.

If these gods can say with justice, " Cast her off," so let it be. Thus adjured, a solemn witness spake the Wind from out the air :"She hath done or thought no evil; Nala, it is truth I speak. King, the treasure of her virtue Damajanti well hath guarded; We ourselves have seen and watched her, closely for three live-long years."

Even as thus the Wind was speaking, flowers fell showering all around, And the god's sweet music sounded, floating on the soft west-wind.' Nala reassumes his form, and the poem ends with his winning back all that he had lost to his unprincipled brother, his re-ascending his ancestral throne, and re-commencing a reign of piety, justice, and felicity.

Thus closes a piece, which, for interest of story, characteristic variety of incident, purity of moral tone, delicacy of sentiment, and richness of imagery, inspires a very high idea of Indian imagination and feeling, and wants but the aid of a faithful and spirited translator to give the name of Vyasa acknowledged rank among the celebrated poets of antiquity. The heroic truth and devotedness of Damajanti,' observes A. Schlegel, at the close of a glowing passage on the general merit of this poem, are as celebrated as those of Penelope in the west, and deserve to be as well known in Europe.'*

The same simple pathos, the same tenderness of feeling, which

• Indische Bibliothek, i. 98.

charm

charm in the more affecting parts of the Nala, prevail in an extract from the Ramayana, (the other great Sanscrit epic)—the death of Yadnadatta, translated by M. Chezy. We are likewise indebted to M. Chezy for the Hermitage of Candu, translated from the Brahma Purana, and the very graceful idyl, of a later school, the Gata Karparu, or L'Absence,' translated in the Journal Asiatique for July, 1822. We have room for little more than an outline of the affecting incident which forms the subject of the episode of the death of Yadnadatta. King Dasaratha, mourning the loss of his son Rama, ascribes his desolate state to the malediction of an aged Bramin, which foretold that before his death he would know the deep sorrow of a childless heart. He proceeds to relate the adventure. Going out on a beautiful day with his bow and arrows, to shoot a buffalo or an elephant, as they might come down to the margin of the river to drink, he was startled by a sound, which he mistook for the cry of an elephant, and discharged the fatal arrow. Like the Cephalus of Ovid, he was answered by the cry of a human victim; not that of a dear and familiar voice, as in the more tragical incident of the Latin poem, (the passionate but affected expressions of which it is curious to compare with the simpler Indian,) but that of an unknown youth, who had come down to draw water in his vessel. The youth was the only support of his aged parents, both of whom were leading the life of hermits, and both completely blind and destitute. The lamentations of the youth at thus leaving his parents in a state of utter destitution, are full of the most exquisite tenderness;-three lives, his own and those of his parents, have been cut off by this single blow; yet, before he expires, he consoles the afflicted king, by informing him that he has not incurred the guilt of even accidentally slaying a Brahmin-a crime of inexpiable enormity to one of the Chatrya, or warrior caste, to which the king belonged, for though the father of the youth was a Brahmin, his mother was but a lowly Sudra. Dasaratha, at the request of the dying youth, proceeds to communicate the sad intelligence to the parents. The blind old recluses hear his step approaching their solitary hermitage, mistake it for that of their son, and, in a tone of tender remonstrance, reprove him for having stayed so long away. The incident is beautifully conceived, and is expressed in the simplest and most natural language. Their affliction, when they hear the fatal tidings, is touched with equal truth and tenderness. They intreat the guiltless homicide to lead them to the body of their son, that they may once more touch what they cannot see. The mother breaks out in a few words of passionate sorrow; the father dwells at greater length on the irreparable loss. We subjoin a few lines of the literal Latin version by M. Bournouf in M.

Chezy's

เ

Chezy's work, lest we should be suspected on this or other occasions to have coloured too highly.

Materque ejus mortui etiam linguâ exanimem faciem lambens, Exclamavit valde flebiliter, ut orba nato juvenca, recens enixa:

"Nonne tibi, Yadnadatta, ego præ vitâ etiam cara sum;
Cur longam viam ingressurus me non alloqueris?
Amplexus igitur me, postea, o fili, abibis.

Quid, o nate, iratus mihi es, quid mihi non respondes?
Continuo pater quoque ejus, membra ejus attingens,
Hoc dixit mortuo filio velut viventi, infelix.

"Nonne ad te ego pater, o fili, simul cum matre veni?
Exsurge ergo, veni ad nos: in collo, fili, amplectere.

Cujus et proximâ nocte ego piam lectionem facientis in silvâ,
Audiam mellitam vocem, sacras scripturas legentis?

Et quis, quum absolvero vespertinas preces, ablutione factâ, et culto per oblationem igne,

Delectabit meos pedes manibus circum attingens?
Herbas, radices, fructus silvestres afferet quis e silvâ,
Nobis cœcis, fili, desiderantibus, fame circumventis?
Sta, ne, ne iveris, fili, Yamæ sedem versus.

Cras mecum pariter et cum matre abibis simul, filiole,

Ambo enim tui desiderio, præsidio destituti, non post longum quoque E spiritu vitali, fili, sejungamur, mortem penes facti sine dubio.'

At the conclusion of his lamentation the son appears with a glorified body in a splendid car, having been immediately admitted, in reward for his filial virtue, to the dwellings of the blest. The parent imprecates on the unintentional homicide the milder yet terrific arn that as he has made them childless, so, before his death, shall he be childless among men-and hence in sorrow for his son Rama, Dasaratha in his old age pines away, and brings down his grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.

Our next extract will be of a very different character, selected rather from the singularity of the subject than from any great poetical merit-the Indian tradition of the Deluge, as it has been extracted from the Mahabharata, published in the original and translated into German by Franz Bopp. The promised Latin version of this indefatigable scholar, if published, has not yet reached us. Nothing has thrown so much discredit on oriental studies, particularly on the valuable Asiatic Researches, as the fixed determination to find the whole of the Mosaic history in the remoter regions of the East. It was not to be expected that, when the new world of oriental literature was suddenly disclosed, the first attempts to explore would be always guided by cool and dispassionate criticism. Even Sir W. Jones was led away, at times, by the ardour of his imagination; and the gorgeous palaces of the Mahabadian dynasty, which were built on the authority of the

Desatir

Desatir and the Dabistan, and thrown upward into an age anterior even to the earliest Indian civilization, have melted away, and 'left not a wreck behind,' before the cooler and more profound investigations of Mr. Erskine. Sir W. Jones was succeeded by Wilford, a man of most excursive imagination, bred in the school of Bryant, who, even if he had himself been more deeply versed in the ancient language, would have been an unsafe guide. But Wilford, it is well known, unfortunately betrayed to the crafty and mercenary pundits whom he employed, the objects which he hoped to find; and these unscrupulous interpreters, unwilling to disappoint their employer, had little difficulty in discovering, or forging, or interpolating, whatever might suit his purpose. The honest candour with which Wilford, a man of the strictest integrity, made the open and humiliating confession of the deceptions which had been practised upon him, ought for ever to preserve his memory from disrespect. The fictions to which he had given currency, only retained, and still we are ashamed to say retain, their ground in histories of the Bible and works of a certain school of theology, from which no criticism can exorcise an error once established: still, however, with sensible men, a kind of suspicion was thrown over the study itself; and the cool and sagacious researches of men, probably better acquainted with their own language than some of the Brahmins themselves, were implicated in the fate of the fantastic and, though profoundly learned, ever injudicious reveries of Wilford.

Now, however, that we may depend on the genuineness of our documents, it is curious to examine the Indian version or versions of the universal tradition of the Deluge; for, besides this extract from the Maha-bharata, Sir W. Jones had extracted from the Bhagavata Purana another, and, in some respects, very different legend. Both of these versions are strongly impregnated with the mythological extravagance of India; but the Purana, one of the Talmudic books of Indian tradition, as M. Bopp observes, is evidently of a much later date than the ruder and simpler fable of the old Epic. It belongs to a less ancient school of poetry, and a less ancient system of religion. While it is much more exuberant in its fiction, it nevertheless betrays a sort of apprehension lest it shall shock the less easy faith of a more incredulous reader; it is manifestly from the religious school of the followers of Vishnu, and, indeed, seems to have some reference to one of the philosophic systems. Yet the outline of the story is the same. In the Maba-bharatic version, Manu, like Noah, stands alone in an age of universal depravity. His virtues, however, are of the

* See the very valuable papers of this gentleman in the Bombay Transactions.

Indian