properly after reading the Kama Sutra would be a dullard indeed.  Some of the remarks are quaint enough.  Thus we are told that “nothing tends to increase love so much as the effects of marking with the nails[FN#397] and biting.”  Some girls when asked in marriage are slow to make up their minds.  With that situation there are, it seems, several ways of dealing.  The simplest is the following:  “When the girl goes to a garden, or to some village in the neigbourhood, the man should, with his friends, fall on her guards, and having killed them, or frightened them away, forcibly carry her off.”  Sometime it is the man who is shy.  In such cases the girl “should bring him to her house under the pretence of seeing the fights of quails, cocks and rams, of hearing the maina (a kind of starling) talk .... she should also amuse him for a long time by telling him such stories and doing such things as he may take most delight in.”

For Edwin and Angelina when they get married there is also much wholesome instruction.  “The wife, whether she be a woman of noble family or a virgin widow re-married,[FN#398] should lead a chaste life.”  “When the man sets out on a journey she should make him swear that he will return quickly.[FN#399] ...  When the man does return home she should worship the God Kama.”  Ladies will be interested to learn that there are twenty-seven artifices by which a woman can get money out of a man.  One is “Praising his intelligence to his face.”  Then there are useful directions for the personal adornment of both sexes.  “If the bone of a peacock or of a hyena be covered with gold and tied to the right hand, it makes a man lovely in the eyes of other people.”

Of the essential portions of the book it is sufficient to say that they are similar to those of the other avowedly erotic Eastern works, the contents of the principal of which have been touched upon by Burton in the Terminal Essay to his Arabian Nights and in some of his notes.  Finally we are told that the Kama Sutra was composed for the benefit of the world by Vatsyayana, while leading the life of a religious student, and wholly engaged in the contemplation of the Deity.  At the same time, the teaching of this holy man amounts to very much the same as that of Maupassant, which is, to use Tolstoy’s words, “that life consists in pleasures of which woman with her love is the chief, and in the double, again reflected delight of depicting this love and exciting it in others."[FN#400]

The work lets a flood of light on Hindu manners and customs; and it must be borne in mind that the translation was issued privately at a high price and intended only for “curious students.”  In the Preface, Burton and Arbuthnot observe that after a perusal of the Hindoo work the reader will understand the subject upon which it treats, “At all events from a materialistic, realistic and practical point of view.  If all science is founded more or less on a stratum of facts, there can be no harm in making known to mankind generally certain matters intimately connected with their private, domestic and social life.  Alas! complete ignorance of them has unfortunately wrecked many a man and many a woman, while a little knowledge of a subject generally ignored by the masses would have enabled numbers of people to understand many things which they believed to be quite incomprehensible, or which were not thought worthy of their consideration.”