in India, from the fact that Vikramaditya and Ujjain and Kalidasa may never have been mentioned together, not associated with the era of 57 B.C., in any extant writing known to the west that comes from before several centuries later.  Because the Brahman were a close corporation that kept the records of history, and kept them secret; and gave out bits when it suited them.  Say that in 1400 (or whenever else it may have been) they first allowed it to be published that Kalidasa flourished at Vikrmaditya’s court:—­they may have been consciously lying, but at least they were talking about what they knew.  They were not guessing, or using their head-gear wrongfully, their lying was intentional, or their truth warranted by knowledge.  And no motive for lying is apparent here.—­It would be very satisfactory, of course, were a coin discovered with King Vikrmaditya’s image and superscription nicely engraved thereon:  Vikramaditya De Gratia:  Uj.  Imp.; Fid.  Def.; 57 B.C. But in this wicked world you cannot have everything; you must be thankful for what you can get.

You may remember that Han Wuti, to solve the Hun problem, sent Chang Ch’ien out through the desert to discover the Yueh Chi’ and that Chang found them at last in Bactria, which they had conquered from Greeks who had held it since Alexander’s time.  He found them settled and with some fair degree of civilization; spoke of Bactria under their sway as a “land of a thousand cities";—­they had learned much since they were nomads driven out of Kansuh by the Huns.  Also they were in the midst of a career of expansion.  Within thirty years of his visit to them, or by 100 B.C., they had spread their empire over eastern Persia, at the expense of the Parthians; and thence went down into India conquering.  By 60 B.C. they held the Punjab and generally the western parts of Hindoostan; then, since they do not seem to have got down into the Deccan, I take it they were held up.  By whom?—­Truly this is pure speculation.  But the state of Malwa, of which Ujjain was the capital, lay right in their southward path; if held up they were, it would have been, probably, by some king of Ujjain.  Was this what happened?—­that the peril of these northern invaders roused Malwa to exert its fullest strength; the military effort spurring up national feeling; the national feeling, creative energies spiritual, mental and imaginative;—­until a great age in Ujjain had come into being.  It is what we often see.  The menace of Spain roused England to Elizabethanism; the Persian peril awakend Athens.  So King Vikramaditya leads out his armies, and to victory; and the Nine Gems of Literature sing at his court.  It is a backwash from Han Wuti’s China, that goes west with Chang Ch’ien to the Yueh Chi, and south with them into India.  And we can look for no apex of literary creation at this time, either in China or Europe.  In the Roman literature of that cycle it is the keen creative note we miss:  Virgil, the nearest to it, cannot be