of the Brahmans, resumed its pre-eminence and took possession of the whole field of literature and art and science as well as of theology.  Oral traditions were reduced to writing and poetry was adapted to both sacred and profane uses in the Puranas, in the metrical code of Manu, in treatises on sacrificial ritual, in Kalidasa’s plays, and in many other works of which only fragments have survived.  Astronomy, logic, philosophy were all cultivated with equal fervour and to the greater glory of Brahmanism.  Local tradition is doubtless quite wrong in assigning to Raja Bikram the noble gateway which is the only monument of Hindu architecture at its best that Ujjain has to show to-day.  But to that period may, perhaps, be traced the graceful, if highly ornate, style of architecture, of which the Bhuvaneshwar temples, several centuries more recent, are the earliest examples that can be at all accurately dated.  To the credit of Brahmanism be it said that in its hour of triumph it remained at least negatively tolerant, as all purely Indian creeds generally have been.  Fa-Hien, who visited India during the reign of Vikramadytia, though dismayed at the desolation which had already overtaken many of the sacred places of Buddhism, pays a generous tribute to the tolerance and statesmanship of that great sovereign.  The country seems, indeed, to have enjoyed real prosperity under a paternal and almost model administration.

Yet the Gupta dynasty endured only a little longer than had that of the Mauryas.  Its downfall was hastened by the long reign of terror which India went through during the invasion of the White Huns.  Europe had undergone a like ordeal nearly a century earlier, for when the Huns began to move out of the steppes of Eastern Asia they poured forth in two separate streams, one of which swept into Eastern Europe, whilst the other flowed more slowly towards Persia and India.  What Attila had been to Europe, Mihiragula was to India, and though the domination of the Huns did not long outlive him, the anarchy they left behind them continued for another century, until “the land of Kuru,” the cradle and battle-field of so many legendary heroes, produced another heroic figure, who, as King Harsha, filled for more than forty years (606-648) the stage of Indian history with his exploits.  He had inherited the blood of the Gupta emperors from his mother, though his father was only a small Raja of Thanesvar, to the north of Delhi.  The tragic circumstances in which he succeeded him made a man of him at the early age of fourteen.  By the time he was twenty he was “master of the five Indias”—­i.e. of nearly the whole of Northern India from Kathiawar to the delta of the Ganges, and henceforth he proved himself as great in peace as in war.  In his case the knowledge we owe to Chinese sources is supplemented by the valuable record left by the Brahman Bana, who lived at his court and wrote the Harsha-Charita.  Taxation, we are told, was lightened, and the assessment