faithful, and his language elegant and spirited, and so closely does classical Italian approach to the Latin language, that, though not written in the learned language of Europe, it will not be lost to the general public; and no oriental library will have any pretention to completeness, without a copy of this magnificent publication.

The Ramayana is essentially the great historic poem of India, the earliest in date, the most complete in design, and the most popular. In it are described the great acts and achievements of Rama, King of Ajodya, the modern Oude, of the solar race of Rajputs, from whom the numerous families, who style themselves" Raghuvansi," still trace their lineage. The other great heroic poem of India is the Mahabharata, which describes the deeds of the lunar race of Rajputs, who ruled at Indraprastha, now Delhi, on the Jumna. This poem is confessedly of a much later date, and, though inordinate in length, it is deficient in completeness and unity of action, and clearly a large number of episodes have been added to it, by which the original plan of the poem is injured. Both these poems have a religious scope also, and are as such the objects of the greatest veneration: the Ramayana narrates the acts of Vishnu, the great creator, in his seventh incarnation, that of Rama; the latter is the chronicle of the acts of Krishna, the eighth incarnation of the same deity. The geography of India is divided between them: in the Ramayana the poet conducts us from Ajodya, the base of operations, beyond the Sutlej, into the Punjab, and thence returning, we are invited across the Vyndha range, into the Deccan, across the Nerbudda and Godaveri, to the most southern point of India, and across the arm of the sea, into the island of Ceylon. In the Mahabharata, Hastinapura is the basis of operations, but the scene of the battles is betwixt the Sutlej and the Jumna, near Thanesur. In some of the Episodes, such as that of Nala, we are conducted into the country of Vidharba, or Berar, where Damayanti resided: and the whole western portion of India is crossed to Dwarka, on the banks of the Indian Ocean, in the neighbourhood of Cutch, at which place Krishna finally fixed his kingdom. The glimpses of geographical knowledge, possessed by the poet, are highly interesting to trace out; and the insight gained into the habits and manners of the people, at the time that the poem was written, is invaluable.

By what combination of syllables was the poet known during the few days that he trod the earth, and left this deathless monument of his power over the feelings of mankind? Is it but a myth, or a shadow, or are we permitted, after this lapse

of ages, and the neglect of successive generations, to pronounce the name? On this subject there is no doubt :-the poet's name was Valmiki; he was contemporaneous with the heroes whom he describes, and he resided on the banks of the Jumna, near its confluence with the Ganges at Allahabad. Of this fact his accuracy of geographical description of the countries betwixt Oude on one side, and the feet of the Vyndha range on the other, leaves no doubt. Faithful tradition has marked the spot, and in the district of Banda, in British Bundlecund, about twenty miles from the right bank of the river Jumna, stands the Hill of Valmiki, near the village of Bogrehee: on the height is a fort, said to have been his residence: it has been our fortunate lot to visit more than one of the seven cities which claim the honour of the birth of the blind Mæonian : we have looked on Troy, and gazed up at the heights of Ida, and we have done so with feelings of reverence; and some such feelings have been engendered, when we stood on the solitary hill of Valmiki, and looked out on the wide view, which the poet must have contemplated, when he was dietating these sounding lines: which view comprehends a portion of the country mentioned in the poem.

We regret to say, that our poet began his life as a notorious highway robber, but, repenting of his misdeeds, he betook himself to austerities on the hill, and eventually, when the spirit moved him, to versifying; this is his only work that has come down to us, and an additional interest is attached to it, from the fact, that the poet received, in his hermitage, Sita, the faithful wife of the hero, when banished by her over-sensitive and jealous lord: there were born her two sons, Kusa and Lava, who were taught, as children, to repeat and chant the lines descriptive of the great actions of their unknown father, by which they were eventually made known, received and acknowledged, and from them are traced the proudest Rajput eastes. We have thus the poet blended with the hero of the piece, and the best proof that Valmiki was well acquainted with the history of Rama.

Some envious critics place the date of these events long subsequent to the Christian era; the Hindus; on the contrary, erect a chronological edifice of their own, of which thousands of years form an unit, and place the date of these transactions in the second age or yug, consequently, many hundred thousand years before the Christian era. The best informed take a middle course, and by a careful comparison of the probable with the improbable, and a collation of facts, give to the Ramayana a date, which would render its author a contem

νοστοι,

porary of Solomon, and such, in spite of Critics, we are prepared to allow it. Whether the poem was, for many ages, handed down by oral tradition, by a race of bards, (in the same manner as we find instances in the Odyssey, in the ease of Phenius and Demodocus,) as Valmiki first communicated it to the sons of Rama, whose united names, according to Schlegel, have passed into a term for rhapsodists, or whether these stately lines were pricked on the leaves of the palm, or written on that species of paper, which, on the authority of Nearchus, we know existed in India as far back as the time of Alexander;-such questions as these we abandon to the curious. It is sufficient for us, that the Epic has descended to our times perfect, inasmuch as no portion of it has been lost. The only difficulty is to get rid of the redundancies which have been added to it. The poem consists of seven cantos, and the number of slokes, or double verses, amounts to twenty-four thousand, which is faithfully recorded. But the last canto is generally rejected as spurious, and it is clearly beyond the scope of the Epic, for it describes events which happened after the return of Rama to his country, his exile being completed, and his labours done. This canto may well be compared with the poems called voσTOL, which were tacked on to the great Epic of the Greeks. Another difficulty has puzzled Editors and Critics, that of this huge poem there are two distinct recensions, in both of which the same story is told with precisely the same details, nearly the same number of couplets and chapters, often corresponding word for word, and line for line, but as often differing, the same sentiment being clothed in different expressions; and so rich is the Sanskrit language, that it could produce a third version, to tell the same story without repeating a single word, if required. These two recensions are known as the Bengali, and that of the Commentators, according to Schlegel, and the Gaodanian, and North country versions according to Gorresio ; and by a singular perversity of critical acumen, both the distinguished German scholars, Schlegel and Lassen, have adopted the latter, while our Italian Editor has, in these volumes, presented us with the former, each party speaking highly in favor of his own choice. If the disciples of Schlegel, as promised by him in his Preface, finish the work commenced by their late master, we shall have the singular literary phenomenon of two editions of the text, differing so very much as to be clearly distinct works, while the translations will closely resemble each other.

As may be supposed, Indian commentators have found both the editions an ample field for their voluminous discussions; but their remarks apply chiefly to the meaning of the expres

sions, and, until European Editors approached the subject, no criticism had been applied to the text. How much more fortunate have been the Homeric poems! Soon after their composition, they were collected under the orders of Pisistratus; how highly they were valued, long before our era, is shewn by Alexander of Macedon always carrying a copy of the Iliad with him in his campaigns: and from the days of the Alexandrian schools until now, the text has been submitted to the most rigid criticism, and placed beyond doubt. Not so the great Epic of the Hindus. Both Editors allow, that they have used much discretion in omitting what appeared to be repetitions, and, though each adhering to the recension that appeared to him the most genuine, they have not hesitated to adopt passages and corrections from the other.

The

However, let us leave the Critics and their rival editions, let us leave the poet and his rhapsodists, and pass to the poems and the hero. In Homer's poems we see too clearly, that the heroes are new men, and not sprung of ancient stock, as the parentage of many of the actors is imputed to the gods, a very convincing proof, that their mortal parents were either unknown, or so obscure, as not to deserve being chronicled; but the hero of the Indian poem is the descendant of a long line of ancestors, whose actions are chronicled; and he himself is the last of the line, who has any very great renown. Ramayana, as may be supposed, is not the only work devoted to the great heroic ballad; in later days, other poets drew their inspiration from the pages of Valmiki, foremost among whom are Kalidasa, one of the ornaments of the court of Vikramaditya, who composed the poem of the Raghuvansa, justly allowed to be the most polished specimen of the later Sanskrit style. The subject is one so naturally suited for scenic representation, that Bhavabhuti, the great dramatist of the Augustan age of Sanskrit literature, adopted the subject, and has left us a drama full of beauty, thus occupying the same position to Valmiki that Euripides does to Homer. Nor are these the only instances, for, as may be supposed, the story of Rama is one of the stock pieces of the literature of the country, and Schlegel_truly remarks, that the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are to India, what the Iliad and Thebaid proved to Greece.

That Valmiki was, or fancied himself to be, one of the earliest of Indian poets, is shown by his taking to himself the credit of having invented the peculiar stately metre in which the poem is written, which metre is the one most generally used by all subsequent authors. According to his own account, Valmiki was passing along the banks of the Tonse, a stream

in Bundlecund, when he spied a pair of herons sporting together, unconscious of the neighbourhood of a hunter, who wantonly shot one of them: the survivor, when it saw its mate thus cruelly killed, filled the air with its lamentations, and pierced the heart of the sage, who uttered two lines of grief spontaneously in this metre, which he subsequently adopted for the poem, and called it Sloka, from a resemblance to the Sanskrit word for grief. This is the asserted origin of a metre, which has been multiplied far beyond the numbers of the Iambic, the Hexameter or other modern verse, for this poem alone contains more couplets than both the Iliad and Odyssey together have lines, and this poem is but an atom amidst the voluminous mass of Sanskrit literature.

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The Ramayana has three distinct parts:-1. The description of the kingdom of Rama's father, the youthful days of the hero, his happy marriage, and his consecration as Crown Prince. 2. The unhappy circumstances that led to the exile of the hero, and the account of the exile. 3. The war with the giants, which closed the exile, and preceded his return to the throne of his ancestors. In the first portion the poet describes the state of Indian Society, as he knew it, and scenes and places with which he was himself more or less perfectly acquainted in the second he conducts his hero to the immemorial forest, which once covered the whole country: of that the poet could know but a small space, but he attempts to describe a state. of things, which to his notions, was probable; his geography becomes more vague, as he crosses the Vyndha range, but he is still in the kingdom of reality, and deals with mortals. In the third part the poet gives loose reins to his imagination; amidst hundreds and thousands of persons brought on the stage, three only are mortals, the hero, his brother and his wife. All the rest are monkeys and giants: the most astounding performances are narrated, a machinery introduced, transcending that of the fabled Titans. No tale of Jack the Giant-killer is more monstrous, no fairy legend to amuse children more absurd, than the achievements that are calmly narrated in these solemn and ever-flowing lines. Here we have tales of Anthropophagi, and monsters far exceeding in power and activity any creatures of western fancy; we read of arms, and weapons, compared to which the arms of the Olympic gods are but as tiny reeds; slaughter takes place of thousands, leaps are taken of hundreds of leagues, and a resident of Europe, on perusal, would wonder, what kind of people could ever have believed such follies, how a poet of such great ability and powers, as proved by the two first parts of his poem, could risk his reputation by the impossibilities of the last.