matters. There can be no obligation on even the humblest critic, to expend much time on what no intelligent creature in England above the age of ten, (unless the epithet intelligent could be applied to a certain half-dozen of heathen pam phleteers) will read without the utmost contempt. Any little value attributable to it, is purely of that incidental kind which is possessed by all literary relics that, however worthless on the score of wisdom or genius, afford illustrations of the state of understanding, of the notions, and the manners, of an ancient and remote people. This one claim being admitted and disposed of, there scarcely can be found, within the ample scope of our language, any terms capable of adequately expressing the despicableness of this Indian epic, which has been and continues to be regarded as a divine performance by so many millions of the people of Asia; and on the value of even the first little section of which its author, at the close of that section, makes this solemn. deposition :

This relation imparts life, and fame, and strength, to those who hear it. Whoever reads the story of Rama will be delivered from all sin. He who constantly peruses this section, in the hearing and repetition of which consists holiness, shall, together with his whole progeny, be for ever delivered from all pain, distress, and sorrow. He who in faith reads this (section) amidst a circle of wise men, will thereby obtain the fruit which arises from perusing the whole Ramayuna, secure to himself the blessings connected with all the states of men, and dying, be absorbed into the deity. A brahman, reading this, becomes mighty in learning and eloquence. The descendant of a Kshutriya reading it, will become a monarch; a Vishya reading, will obtain a most prosperous degree of trade; and a Shoodra hearing it, will become great.' p. 18.

This gives a very tolerable antepast of the general quality of the work, in point of what, in our part of the world, is called sense. And indeed the grand characteristic distinction of this performance, so far as it proceeds in this volume, and of the other great works, as they are termed, of Hindoo genius, so far as may be judged from short portions of them translated, is the negation of reason. Imagine a tribe of human beings in whom the intellectual faculty, strictly so called, should suddenly become extinct, while imagination remained, and, on being thus rid of its master, should instantly spring abroad into all the possibilities of wild and casual excursion; the geniuses of such a tribe, that is, the individuals possessed of a

* This is one mode in which, with much solemnity, the Ramayuna is constantly read."

+A Shoodra is not permitted to read it.'

more lively imagination than the rest, would write just such poetry as the Ramayuna. It shews, throughout, we do not say a violation, or rejection, but rather a clear absence, a total non-perception, of the principles of pro portion and analogy, of the laws of consistency and probability. There is a full abrogation of all the rules, de finitive of the relation between cause and effect. Consequently any cause may produce any effect; the mouse may eat the mountain, Jonah may swallow the whale; and the author appears to rate his success in the effort at grandeur, very much in proportion to the aggravated excess of the absurdity, the superlative degree, if we might so express it, of the impossibility. Probability is assumed for every proposition or image that may be put in words, though by its essential inconsistency it defy the power of conception. And if, for a few moments, the poet happens to keep clear of things impossible in the strict sense, that is, things of which the definition would involve a contradiction, he can hardly fail to be found in what is, doubtless, according to whoever is the Hindoo Longinus, the next lower degree of sublimity, the creating of monstrosities; describing beings and actions which, though not metaphysically impossible, are out of all analogy with what we see or can otherwise know of the order of the creation. Thus a Thus a creature with an elephant's body and fifty human heads, singing a grand chorus, is not an im possible being in the strict sense, however desperate an undertaking it might be to go in search of it to any part of the mundane system; and the only objection a Hindoo poet would have to such a fiction, would arise from its being too diminutive and tame an effort of absurdity,-unless he might be allowed to say that the body was of the bulk of a vast mountain, and that each of the heads roared a tempest.

It is

but very rarely, that for a moment the absurdity of this poetry is confined to any thing so near the neighbourhood of rationality, as what we may denominate surple enormousness,-that is, the swelling of agents and actions to a magnitude which we know to be far beyond any thing in reality, but still in conformity to a certain scale, by which these extraordinary beings are kept in some assignable proportion to the ordinary ones of their genus, and by which a due proportion is kept between the agents and the things they accomplish; as Homer, a manufacturer of giants in a very small way, contrives to avoid disgusting us when he makes some of his combatants easily toss such

stones as ten men of the common sort could not lift. Even in the description of the people of Brobdignag, (to say nothing of the strong satirical sense which is the substratum of all the Gulliver fictions) a strict law of consistency and proportion is observed throughout all the prodigious giantis ns, evincing the constant intervention of intellect. In the Ramayuna, all is pure measureless raving. An imagination which seems to combine the advantages of mania, superstition, and drunkenness, is put a-going, makes a set of what it names worlds, of its own, and fills them with all sorts of agents; gods, sages, demi-god-monkies, and a numberless diversity of fantastic entities, at once magnified and distorted to the last transcendant madness of extravagance, some additional monster still striding and bellowing into the hurly-burly, whenever the poet thinks it not sufficiently turbulent and chaotic. None of these agents are exhibited with any defined nature, or ascertained measure of power, or regular mode of action. They any of them can do, and are made to do, just whatever happens to dash into the fancy of the poetic raver. A sage is represented as frightening all the gods; and if the idea of his ordering and forcing them all into his snuff-box had happened to come into the poet's head, they had undoubtedly been made to hold their court there some ten thousand years, at the least. And thus the narration, if so slightly connected a course of stories can be so called, is made up of a set of achievements which confound all attempts to form a steady notion of the nature and capacities, positive or relative, of any of the beings that accomplish them; while the stories are so perfectly matchless in silly extravagance, that the very utmost absurdity and foolery of the most desperate European rant and mockheroic, creep and toil, as if under the weight of comparative rationality, at an infinite distance behind the enor mous vapour-composed giant of Hindoo poetry. The more the writer displays of his sort of grandeur, the more contempt the reader feels; the measureless vastness of all the personages and operations, which was sublimity in his account, and which almost overpowers all the Brahmins of Hindoostan, with religious awe is to us exactly imbecility seen through an immensely magnifying medium; and the mind labours for a greater ability of despising, than it has ever, in the ordinary course of its exercise, been excited to acquire.

It is as a reputed great work of genius that the Ramayuna will encounter utter contempt in Europe, separately

from, as far as we can separate and make allowances for, its character as a teacher of a monstrous and puerile mythology. When this kind of allowance has been made for Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, what remains is, that they are very great poets. Even the advantage usually and reasonably proposed to be communicated by making better known the ancient writings of a people, that of our obtaining a knowledge of their manners from pictures drawn by themselves, will be sought in vain from a performance like this, in which all things are ambitiously, though childishly preternatural. It was, for instance, probably no part of the ancient manners and customs of India, for an individual to perform sacred austerities, as they are called, in a particular place for a thousand, or ten thousand years together.

As to what form the beautiful spangles of our western poetry and eloquence, the original and apposite metaphors and comparisons, we should think there is nothing of the kind to be found in this grand oriental performance. There are indeed metaphors and comparisons; but, as far as we can judge, they are a mere common-place of the country where the poet lived. The moon and stars, a number of animals and vegetables, some particular gods and heroes, &c. &c., were become a common stock for the use of all that wanted tropes in speech or writing; so that there was no more novelty or ingenuity in introducing them, than there is among us in repeating those rare similes, as rotten as a pear, as sound as a bell, as obstinate as a swine, as valiant as Alexander, and so forth. It is not to be pointedly objected to this, or any other eastern performance in particular, that the analogy in the simile or metaphor is usually very slight and general, as this is a characteristic of almost all oriental composition.

The quantity of general remark we have been betrayed into, leaves no room for any attempt at displaying in detail the qualities or parts of this first book of the Ramayuna. And we repeat we cannot acknowledge any duty of wasting so much labour, on what forms a more egregious mass of folly, than would be produced by any one of our readers that should keep a month's diary, (or rather noctuary, since they undoubtedly all rise early in a morning), of his dreams. In the descriptive remarks we have made, we have been able to give but an extremely feeble idea of the surpassing excess of absurdity which prevails throughout the production, which is really worth any one's reading that

cares to see the maximum of that quality. The basis of the story is the birth, life, and adventures, of Rama, who is an incarnation of the god Vishnu, a god evidently of the foremost rank, but of what power or excellence, as contradistinguished from his brother magnates, we may safely defy all the Brahmins in India, and their disciples in England to shew, from this or their other sacred books; for all these deities seem jumbled, as by purely accidental evolutions, into bigness and littleness by turns. The king, whose son Vishnu consented to become at the persuasion of all the gods, who were terrified by Ravuna, a demon whose pernicious designs could be frustrated by no celestial being but one in human shape, had been long childless, and had been performing a course of religious austerities to obtain from Brahma, (or whether in spite of him, is not clear) the happiness of an heir. The favour was granted, and Rama was the prince. He of course gave, in early years, amazing signs of the power that was in due time to per form achievements which were to astonish and shake the universe. Many adventures, however, are related before his career of action commences; and after he does come into play, the narration is loaded with many bulky episodes about the adventures of other heroes. Of one of these personages it is stated, that, like Rama's father, he was childless, and that he had been engaged, if we mistake not, several thousand years in religious austerities, to induce the gods, or the king of them, to confer a similar favour. It was grant ed, to some purpose; for he had two consorts, and it was was promised that the one should bring him one son, of transcendant merit and prowess, and the other-sixty thou sand, inferior to that one, but yet all of great talents and expectations; and it was offered to the choice of the two ladies which would be the mother of the one, and which of the sixty thousand. The latter undertaking may seem to involve very considerable difficulties;-but nothing is diffi cult in the hands of a Hindoo poet. This daring matron was in due time happily delivered of a tree, a shrub, or whatever it may be called,-a gourd we think it is in the book,-on which the sixty thousand grew, as it might have been nuts or currants, and fell off into the form of so many mighty heroes; who at their father's command, and in pursuit of a god or demon who had stolen a horse which he had appointed for a sacrifice, dug through the earth from side to side, in various directions, reducing it to the condition of a worm-eaten cork; and that in a very short time, and in spite of its being of thousands of times greater bulk, than our mathematicians have, in the true spirit of Eu