the Giver of wealth and victory, whenever fresh triumphs adorn their name, and with that interest they profess, at all times, in the religious welfare of their servants. We would put it to their consciences and ask, whether out of their gorge ous revenue it be not possible to make the little sacrifice, which is requisite for an object so essential to the elevation of the British character in the east, so conducive to the stability of their empire. Let it be viewed as a question of political economy, or of profit and loss; and we should like to know what real public good or substantial profit results from that singular parsimony, which reckons everything denied to the spiritual and moral wants of a people to be a saving to the state. Or can nothing be spared from those enormous facultates, which have not yet been touched with the knife of retrenchment? Cannot enough be spared for the decencies of religion out of the overflowings, which minister month by month to the plethory and pride and luxury of civil functionaries? Or can want of finances be conscientiously pleaded, when patronage is profusely squandered upon false religions, and a more liberal tribute paid to the gods of the heathen, than to the King of kings and Lord of lords, and a lavish generosity displayed in support of the shrines of Hinduism, and of schools for teaching that Mohammed is the great prophet of God, and Christ to be denied before men?

ART. V.-1. The Poems of Chand. MSS.

2. Tod's Annals of Rajasthan, 2 vols. London.

FROM the traditionary legends extant in Western Hindustan, it is evident that the mountainous and desert tracts known under the names of Marhattra and Rajputana, and the salubrious regions that are watered by the mighty rivers of the Himalaya, once nursed a heroic and independent people, far excelling in manners, in civilization, and in arms, those rude and haughty tribes who dwelt around. For throughout the whole range of those legends, there prevails such a high tone of sentiment and feeling, such burning enthusiasm and martial vigour, and such a noble and exalted philosophy, that it is impossible to conceive that any nation, less cultivated than the Athenians in the days of Pisistratus, could have had the refinement to think, or the boldness to execute, what is there speculated upon, and described.

That they were a people superior in courage and enterprise to every other tribe in the peninsula, is incontrovertibly established by the fact, that the best and bravest soldiers of our Indian army are now drawn from the petty provinces of Rajwarra, from the wild and romantic districts of the Vindayah mountains, and from the Doab. And though the Mussulman invasion has swept away all traces of their pre-eminence in arts and knowledge, yet from the few ruined and dilapidated, but still splendid, monuments of art, which have escaped the fury of the ruthless invaders, it is clearly discernible that Northern and Western India was once the seat of a race, equal at least, if not superior, in point of civilization, to the French people in the time of Charles Martel.

That a nation that had built cities, larger and fairer than the fairest towns of Southern Europe, excavated temples out of the solid rock on the truest principles of architecture, and made laws, that are, in part, administered at this day by an enlightened and Christian Government to millions of human beings, should have been greatly deficient in any branch of polite learning, and particularly in poetry, is a supposition incompatible with common sense and the beautiful fragments of ancient composition that are now in our hands, do not merely set aside such a supposition, but establish on unimpeachable evidence these important facts: first, that they were a race peculiarly superior to all around them in this department of polite literature; and, secondly, that they arrived at that superiority by successive and distinct stages of improvement.

T

In all ages, and among all nations, when society is in its primitive state, and science is young, the nearest approach to any thing like poetry is made by the homely, but strong and masculine couplets, sung by bards and itinerant minstrels. From those downright and matter-of-fact, but frequently not unpoetic or unharmonious lines-poetry gradually developes itself with the language, and like every other science, ripens by time. It is not our intention to state that genuine inspiration, the real mens divinior" of the poet, is the growth of ages; but it is our opinion, and we believe the opinion of all who have considered the subject, that a great poem cannot be written, unless the language has been considerably elevated, and rendered flexible, by the repeated compositions of those metrical romances now known under the name of ballads; and that a nation that can boast of even one great poem, must at one time have been possessed of these simple, but vigorous ballads.

To prove our theory, we need only refer to the literature of Greece, and the Homeric poems; to the literature of Rome, and the Saturnian songs; to the literature of England, and the Liddesdale ballads; to the literature of Spain, and the chronicles of the Cid; to the literature of Arabia, and the chaunts of Azmut; to the literature of Tartary, and the songs of Kurroglou; and, in fact, to the literature of every country, and the poems of its first bards.

It is evident then, that ballads must precede great poems. It is known, that there are many great poems among the Hindus; and we have therefore a right to infer, that the Hindus once possessed these interesting ballads in abundance; and though these have wholly disappeared, or remain in too small numbers to be capable of being witnesses to the argument, we have still enough of indirect, or secondary evidence, to prove the soundness of our inference.

The Sanskrit scholar will observe, that though the Mahabharat and the Ramayana may now be considered as two complete and entire epics, yet, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, they are only clever compilations of detached ballads. The connecting links are much more studied, and much more modern than the episodes. They plainly show that there were at least two persons engaged in completing the poems, and in making them what they now are. The different phraseology, the unpolished simplicity, the unconfined boldness of conception, and, in fact, the evident superiority of observation and description, will convince him, that the episodes are the productions of authors, who had nothing in common with the better informed, more delicate, but less vigorous versifiers who strung

them together; and this, coupled with the present practice of the potentates of Northern India of retaining bards, will confirm him in the belief, that ballad poetry was once largely cultivated by the haughty and aristocratic tribes of Northern Hindustan.

That poetry has altogether disappeared. With the exception of the two great epics already mentioned, and the measured chronicle of Chand, the last of the Chohan bards, not a trace remains of those fresh and vigorous writings, which once commemorated the valor of the chiefs of Rajasthan. Time, war, oppression, ignorance, devastating invasions, and savage intolerance, have carried away the war-ballads we would now fain possess. When the written documents perished in the sack of the royal cities, the songs remained awhile in the memories of an oppressed. and insulted, but proud and high-spirited people, reminding them of the magnificence of their fallen race, till, like all other traditions, they were swept away first from the memories of the great, and then, after lingering for a season, like the flarings of an expiring taper, among the shepherds in the nooks of the Vindayah and Aravelli mountains, they perished for ever.

The loss of the ballads was one of the great evils of the Moslem invasion. It was one of the irreparable injuries inflicted on the Indian community by the foreign invaders. It not only deprived the erect, daring, and honorable Rahthore of his last consolation amid danger and dishonor, and robbed a mighty but fallen people of every incentive calculated to rouse its chilled and benumbed energies, but it deprived the world of songs that must have been valuable to the general reader for their intrinsic beauty, and inestimably precious to the historian and moralist, because they would have illustrated the character of a great and interesting people.

With the Mussulman invasion, things underwent a great change. Indian poetry assumed a new aspect. The ballads,for it must be remembered, that the Hindus, like the Greeks, had, up to this time, never ceased to cultivate their ballads,when the storm had swept over, breathed no more of that fierce patriotism, and ardent love of independence, which had characterized them of old. The glory of the Rahthores had expired with their dominion. Their capital had been taken, their palace had been sacked, and their chief, the descendant of a thousand kings, had perished, as became his race, on the field of battle. The invaders had spared neither age nor sex; they had trampled on the people, they had mocked the

nobility; and as the humiliation had been great, the ballads, in the crushing tyranny of the foreigner, had lost their original nerve and power. Indeed, the latter books of the Poet Chand, who lived but to see the beginning of the troubles of which we speak, are characterized by such utter sadness and depression of spirits, and present such a startling contrast to the lively vivacity and fiery enthusiasm of the earlier parts, that, but for the occasional and fitful gleams which lighten their darkness, the reader would often doubt if one poet composed the whole.

But to do the Moslems justice, it was not alone their despotism, though that was the chief cause of the nation's degradation, that corrupted the ballads of ancient Hindustan. Every thing that tended to destroy the nationality, the peculiarity that set the Hindus apart among nations, tended also to corrupt the ballads. The very reforms introduced by the conquerors presented insuperable obstacles to the cultivation of this species of literature. The strange philosophy, the still stranger religion, the foreign laws, the courts of justice, in fact, every thing appertaining to the Mohammedans, were against the bards. By constant familiarity with novel innovations, the Hindu lost all pride in the recollection of his own once enthusiastically loved institutions. His heart did not swell so high as it was wont to do, at the mention of his nation's victories: and the poets, therefore, in a great measure ceased to cultivate the once popular songs, which applauded those institutions, and celebrated those victories.

That a people of so much pride and sensibility as the Rajputs should have wilfully neglected their own national institutions and their national songs, is certainly most strange, if we do not consider the great ascendancy of the Mohammedan conquerors in the central districts. But in justice also to the Hindus, it must be said, that in the wild wood-lands of Northern India, and in the savage glens of the Vindayah and Aravelli mountains, where the crescent banner had not subdued the pure races, and where a "child of the sun" still ruled over a poor, but erect and enthusiastic peasantry, the case was far otherwise. In spite of the great blow which the nation had received by the reduction of the midland districts, which formed by far the fairest and most enlightened part of the empire, the shepherd boys, amid those primæval glens and forests, still sang the songs of their heroic fore-fathers, undismayed by the torrent rushing with unimaginable impetuosity on the neighbouring plains. For there they felt they were free, free as the young eagle of