The imaginative faculty never fails the bards of the Indian Epics, who too often indulge in a very delirium of exaggeration. Yet, notwithstanding their supreme contempt for probabilities or consistency, and their lofty scorn of numerical limitations, it cannot be denied that these Hindu poets, with their lawless imaginations, take us completely captive and carry us along with them, surprised and delighted, through the wonderful scenes of their creation; while one cannot but feel in their company that the intellectual atmosphere which surrounds them is a stronger one and more spiritual than that which was breathed by the Greeks of Homer or the Teutons of the Eddas. On the whole, it may be said that the Indian Epics as they have reached us, reveal to the careful student an ancient free and vigorous primitive social life and turbulent times, overlaid by a later and less healthy, if more refined civilization, which was permeated with ecclesiasticism; and that they exhibit a strange mixture of what Mr. Herbert Spencer would call the “ethics of enmity” and the “ethics of amity.” The later stage of Indian history--the age of Brahmanism succeeding the heroic age and continuing to the present day--may, I think, be well compared with the Middle Ages in Europe, when priestly influence was predominant and national life at a low ebb. Europe, under the influence of the spirit of industrialism and modern science, has emancipated itself from the numbing influences of the Dark Ages. When will India do the same? For how many more centuries is she destined to wrangle over unprofitable theological questions, as did the Byzantine Greeks while the conqueror was thundering at their gates? My pleasant undertaking has occupied more time than I had anticipated when I took it in hand; but I leave it now with a profound appreciation of the capabilities of a people who have produced such works as the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata.” In every age--even in an industrial age of busy scientific progress and mechanical triumphs like our own--the human mind turns with fond interest to any picture which shows how men in the fore-time lived and thought, and it listens eagerly to any song which echoes through the vanished years the fervent hopes and lofty aspirations of buried generations. Therefore, I trust that my little work, though it be but a sketch of a great picture and the echo of a grand old song, may find favour with the public, and help to open up to English readers a strange but interesting world of Eastern ideas and conceptions. Above all, however, I hope that my pages represent--as I believe they do--both fairly and adequately the great Epics of India. CHISWICK PRESS:--CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. FOOTNOTES: