The sententious element is here much more prominent than in the Panchatantra, and the number of verses introduced is often so great as to seriously impede the progress of the prose narrative. These verses, however, abound in wise maxims and fine thoughts. The stanzas dealing with the transitoriness of human life near the end of Book IV. have a peculiarly pensive beauty of their own. The following two may serve as specimens:-- As on the mighty ocean's waves Two floating logs together come, And, having met, for ever part: So briefly joined are living things. As streams of rivers onward flow, And never more return again: So day and night still bear away The life of every mortal man. It is uncertain who was the author of the Hitopadeça; nor can anything more definite be said about the date of this compilation than that it is more than 500 years old, as the earliest known MS. of it was written in 1373 A.D. As both the Panchatantra and the Hitopadeça were originally intended as manuals for the instruction of kings in domestic and foreign policy, they belong to the class of literature which the Hindus call niti-çastra, or "Science of Political Ethics." A purely metrical treatise, dealing directly with the principles of policy, is the Niti-sara, or "Essence of Conduct." of Kamandaka, which is one of the sources of the maxims introduced by the author of the Hitopadeça. A collection of pretty and ingenious fairy tales, with a highly Oriental colouring, is the Vetala-panchavimçati, or "Twenty-five Tales of the Vetala" (a demon supposed to occupy corpses). The framework of this collection is briefly as follows. King Vikrama of Ujjayini is directed by an ascetic (yogin) to take down from a tree and convey a corpse, without uttering a single word, to a spot in a graveyard where certain rites for the attainment of high magical powers are to take place. As the king is carrying the corpse along on his shoulders, a Vetala, which has entered it, begins to speak and tells him a fairy tale. On the king inadvertently replying to a question, the corpse at once disappears and is found hanging on the tree again. The king goes back to fetch it, and the same process is repeated till the Vetala has told twenty-five tales. Each of these is so constructed as to end in a subtle problem, on which the king is asked to express his opinion. The stories contained in this work are known to many English readers under the title of Vikram and the Vampire. Another collection of fairy tales is the Simhasana-dvatrimçika, or "Thirty-two Stories of the Lion-seat" (i.e. throne), which also goes by the name of Vikrama-charita, or "Adventures of Vikrama." Here it is the throne of King Vikrama that tells the tales. Both this and the preceding collection are of Buddhistic origin.