[Footnote 1:  PRINSEP, in a private letter to Turnour, in 1836, speaking of the singular value of the Mahawanso in collating the chronology of India, says, “had your Buddhist chronicles been accessible to Sir W. Jones and Wilford, they would have been greedily seized to correct anomalies at every step.”]

But they display in their mysterious rhymes few facts or revelations to repay the ordinary reader for the labour of their perusal.  Written exclusively by the Buddhist priesthood, they present the meagre characteristics of the soulless system which it is their purpose to extol.  No occurrence finds a record in their pages which does not tend to exalt the genius of Buddhism or commemorate the acts of its patrons:  the reigns of the monarchs who erected temples for its worship, or consecrated shrines for its relics, are traced with tiresome precision; even where their accession was achieved by usurpation and murder, their lives are extolled for piety, provided they were characterised by liberality to the church; whilst those alone are stigmatised as impious and consigned to long continued torments, whose reigns are undistinguished by acts conducive to the exaltation of the national worship.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Asoca, “who put to death one hundred brothers,” to secure the throne to himself, is described in the Mahawanso, ch. v. p. 21, as a prince “of piety and supernatural wisdom.”  Even Malabar infidels, who assassinated the Buddhist kings, are extolled as “righteous sovereigns” (Mahawanso, ch. xxi. p. 127); but a Buddhist king who caused a priest to be put to death who was believed to be guilty of a serious crime, is consigned by the Rajavali to a hell with a copper roof “so hot that the waters of the sea are dried as they roil above it.”—­Rajavali, p. 192.]

The invasions which disturbed the tranquillity of the throne, and the schisms which rent the unity of the church, are described with painful elaboration; but we search in vain for any instructive notices of the people or of their pursuits, for any details of their social condition or illustration of their intellectual progress.  Whilst the commerce of all nations was sweeping along the shores of Ceylon, and the ships of China and Arabia were making its ports their emporiums; the national chronicles, whose compilation was an object of solicitude to successive dynasties, are silent regarding these adventurous expeditions; and utterly indifferent to all that did not affect the progress of Buddhism or minister to the interests of the priesthood.[1]

[Footnote 1:  It has been surmised that in the intercourse which subsisted between India and the western world by way of Alexandria and Persia, and which did not decline till the sixth or seventh century, the influences of Nestorian Christianity may have left their impress on the genius and literature of Buddhism; and in the legends of its historians one is struck by the many passages that suggest a similarity