of the Soul behind it really is;—­but credited with an extra-human sanction.  But it would take a long time.  When modern creeds are gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration?  —­To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may answer.  They will not sing Dr. Watts’s doggerel in their churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth’s The World is too much with us, or Henley’s I am the Captain of my Soul. And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can imagine such poems as these coming to be thought of as not merely from the Human Soul, an ever-present source of real inspiration, —­but as revelations by God himself, from which not one jot or tittle should be taken without blasphemy; given by God when he founded his one true religion to mankind.  We lose sight of the spirit, and exalt the substance; then we forget the substance, and deify the shadow.  We crucify our Saviors when they are with us; and when they are gone, we crucify them worse with our unmeaning worship and dogmas made on them.

Well, the age of the Vedas passed, and pralayas came, and new manvantaras; and we come at last to the age of Classical Sanskrit; and first to the period of the Epics.  This too is a Kshattriya age.  Whether it represents a new ascendency of the Kshattriyas, or simply a continuance of the old one:  whether the priesthood had risen to power between the Vedas and this, and somewhat fallen from it again,—­or whether their rise was still in progress, but not advanced to the point of ousting the kings from their lead,—­who can say?  But this much, perhaps, we may venture without fear:  the Kshattriyas of the Epic age were not the same as those of the Upanishads.  They were not Adept-Kings and Teachers in the same way.  By Epic age, I mean the age in which the epics were written, not that of which they tell.  And neither the Mahabharata nor the Ramayana was composed in a day; but in many centuries;—­and it is quite likely that on them too Brahmanical hands have been tactfully at work.  Some parts of them were no doubt written in the centuries after Christ; there is room enough to allow for this, when you think that the one contains between ninety and a hundred thousand, the other about twenty-four thousand couplets;—­the Mahabharata being about seven times, the Ramayana about twice as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.  So the Age of the Epics must be narrowed down again, to mean the age that gave birth to the nuclei of them.

As to when it may have been, I do not know that there is any clue to be found.  Modern criticism has been at work, of course, to reduce all things to as commonplace and brain-mind a basis as possible; but its methods are entirely the wrong ones.  Mr. Romesh Dutt, who published abridged translations of the two poems in the late nineties, says of the Mahabharata that the great war which it tells of “is believed