I may, no doubt, be justly reminded that every Indian History, written within recent years, contains abstracts of the two epics; but these abstracts, I would observe, are skeletons rather than miniatures of the poems; they are the dry bones, on which the historians try to support a fabric of historical inferences or conjectures, and they are necessarily deficient in the mythological, romantic and social elements so important to a proper comprehension of the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata.” Besides, when the structures are so colossal, so composite and in many respects so beautiful, there can be no harm in having yet another view of them, taken probably from a new standpoint. In Europe the Homeric poems are very extensively studied in the original Greek; they are productions of very moderate size in comparison with the Indian Epics; many and excellent translations of them, in both prose and verse, are always issuing from the press; and yet condensed epitomes of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are welcomed by the reading public, by whom also prose versions of the poetical narratives of even English poets--as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Browning--are favourably received. Such being the case, I make no apology for the appearance of this little volume, in which I have not only tried to reproduce faithfully, _in a strictly limited space_, the main incidents and more striking features of those gigantic and wonderful creations of the ancient bards of India--the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata”--but also to direct attention to the abiding influence of those works upon the habits and conceptions of the modern Hindu. As they are often very incorrectly cited in support of views for which there is no authority whatever in their multitudinous verses, it has been my especial aim to give as accurate a presentment as possible of the Indian Epics, taken as a whole; so that a fair and just idea--_neither too high nor too low_--of their varied contents and their intellectual level might be formed by the readers of this volume, be they Europeans or Indians. And from what I have recently learned, I have good ground for believing that both classes of readers will, after perusal of this little book, be in a position to see the erroneous character of many ideas in regard to life in ancient India which are current in their respective circles. Where, for any reason, I have especially desired that an event recorded, or an opinion expressed, in the epics should be reproduced without the possibility of misrepresentation on my part, I have thought it best to quote _verbatim_ the translations of them made by Hindu scholars; although, unfortunately, their versions are by no means elegant, and, indeed, often quite the reverse. But as they, no doubt, reflect the structure and texture of the poems in a way that no more free or polished English rendering could possibly do, I fancy the citations I have made will not be unwelcome to most readers.