in many ways extremely human incarnations—­of Vishnu.  At the same time, the Aryan Hindus, as they went on subduing the numerous aboriginal races of India, constantly facilitated their assimilation by the more or less direct adoption of their primitive deities and religious customs.  The two great epics, the Mahabharata, with its wonderful episode, the Baghavat-Ghita, which is the apotheosis of Krishna, and the Ramayana, which tells the story of Rama, show the infusion into Hinduism of a distinctly national spirit in direct opposition to the almost cosmopolitan catholicity of Buddhism, sufficiently elastic to adapt itself even to the political aspirations of non-Hindu conquerors as well as of non-Hindu races beyond the borders of Hindustan, in Nepal and in Ceylon, in Burma and in Tibet, in China and in Japan.  The conflict between Buddhist and Hindu theology might not have been irreconcilable, for Hinduism, as we know, was quite ready to admit Buddha himself into the privileged circle of its own gods as one of the incarnations of Vishnu.  What was irreconcilable was the conflict between a social system based on Brahmanical supremacy and one that denied it—­especially after Hinduism had acquired a new sense of Indian patriotism which only reached fuller development in our own times when it was quickened by contact with European nationalism.

Hindus themselves prefer, however, to-day to identify Indian nationalism with the period when from another long interval of darkness, which followed the downfall of the Kushan kingdom, Indian history emerges into the splendour of what has been called “the golden age of Hinduism” in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era under the great Gupta dynasty, who ruled at Ujjain.  Few Indian cities are reputed to be more ancient or more sacred than the little town of Ujjain on the Sipra river, known as Ozen[=i] to the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as Viceroy of Western India.  It owes its birth to the gods themselves.  When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was, for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the sacrificial fire, which consumed her—­the prototype of all pious Hindu widows who perform Sati—­in the presence of gods and Brahmans.  Shiva, maddened with grief, gathered up the bones of his unfortunate consort and danced about with them in a world-shaking frenzy.  Her scattered bones fell to earth, and wherever they fell the spot became sacred and a temple sprang up in her honour.  One of her elbows fell on the banks of the Sipra at Ujjain, and few shrines enjoy greater or more widespread fame than the great temple of Maha-Kal, consecrated to her worship and that of Shiva.  Its wealth was fabulous when it was looted and destroyed by Altamsh and his Pathan Mahomedans in 1235.  The present buildings are for the most part barely 200 years old, and remarkable chiefly for the insistency with which the lingam