been ruthless and brutal barbarians with a sprinkling of fine spirits incarnate among them; no European literature yet has had time to evolve to the point where it could portray a Yudhishthira, at the end of a national epic, arriving at the gates of heaven with his dog,—­and refusing to enter because the dog was not to be admitted.  There have been, with us, too great ups and downs of civilization; too little continuity.  We might have grown to it by now, had that medieval pralaya been a quiet and natural thing, instead of what it was:—­ a smash-up total and orgy of brutalities come as punishment for our sins done in the prime of manvantara.

A word or two as to the Ramayana. Probably Valmiki had the other epic before his mental vision when he wrote it; as Virgil had Homer.  There are parallel incidents; but his genius does not appear in them;—­he cannot compete in their own line with the old Kshattriya bards.  You do not find here so done to the life the chargings of lordly tuskers, the gilt and crimson, the scarlet and pomp and blazonry, of war.  The braying of the battle conches is muted:  all is cast in a more gentle mold.  You get instead the forest and its beauty; you get tender idylls of domestic life.—­This poem, like the Mahabharata, has come swelling down the centuries; but whereas the latter grew by the addition of new incidents, the Ramayana grew by the re-telling of old ones.  Thus you may get book after book telling the same story of Rama’s life in the forest-hermitage by the Godavari; each book by a new poet in love with the gentle beauty of the tale and its setting, and anxious to put them into his own language.  India never grows tired of these Ramayanic repetitions.  Sita, the heroine, Rama’s bride, is the ideal of every good woman there; I suppose Shakespeare has created no truer or more beautiful figure.  To the Mahabharata, the Ramayana stands perhaps as the higher Wordsworth to Milton; it belongs to the same great age, but to another day in it.  Both are and have been wonderfully near the life of the people:  children are brought up on them; all ages, castes, and conditions make them the staple of their mental diet.  Both are semi-sacred; neither is quite secular; either relates the deeds of an avatar of Vishnu; ages have done their work upon them, to lift them into the region of things sacrosanct.

And now at last we come to the age of King Vikramaditya of Ujjain,—­to the Nine Gems of Literature,—­to a secular era of literary creation,—­to the Sanskrit Drama, and to Kalidisa, its Shakespeare;—­and to his masterpiece, The Ring of Sakoontala.