As to when it may have been, I do not know that there is any clue to be found. Modern criticism has been at work, of course, to reduce all things to as commonplace and brain-mind a basis as possible; but its methods are entirely the wrong ones. Mr. Romesh Dutt, who published abridged translations of the two poems in the late nineties, says of the _Mahabharata_ that the great war which it tells of "is believed to have been fought in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ"; and of the _Ramayana,_ that it tells the story of nations that flourished in Northern India about a thousand years B. C.--Is believed by whom, pray? It is also believed, and has been from time immemorial, in India, that Krishna, who figures largely in the _Mahabharata,_ died in the year 3102 B.C.; and that he was the eighth avatar of Vishnu; and that Rama, the hero of the _Ramayana,_ was the seventh. Now brain-mind criticism of the modern type is the most untrustworthy thing, because it is based solely on circumstantial evidence; and when you work upon that, you ought to go very warily;--it is always likely that half the circumstances remain un-discovered; and even if you have ninety and nine out of the hundred possible, the hundredth, if you had it, might well change the whole complexion of the case. And this kind of criticism leads precisely nowhere, does not build anything, but pulls down what was built of old. So I think we must be content to wait for real knowledge till those who hold it may choose to reveal it; and meanwhile get back to the traditional starting-point; --say that the War of the Kuravas and Pandavas happened in the thirty-second century B.C.; Rama's invasion of Lanka, ages earlier; and that the epics began to be written, as they say, somewhere between the lives of Krishna and Buddha,--somewhere between 2500 and 5000 years ago.