Then they gave him a khillut and gold,
All for his honour and grace and truth;
Sent him back to his mountain-hold--
Muslim manners have touch of ruth;

Sent him back, with dances and drum--
Wah! my Rajah Runjeet Dehu!
To Chunda Kour and his Jummoo home--
Wah! wah! futteh!--wah, gooroo!

_TWO BOOKS FROM THE ILIAD OF INDIA._

_TWO BOOKS FROM THE ILIAD OF INDIA._

(_Now for the first time translated_.)

There exist certain colossal, unparalleled, epic poems in the sacred
language of India, which were not known to Europe, even by name, till Sir
William Jones announced their existence; and which, since his time, have
been made public only by fragments--by mere specimens--bearing to those
vast treasures of Sanskrit literature such small proportion as cabinet
samples of ore have to the riches of a mine. Yet these twain mighty poems
contain all the history of ancient India, so far as it can be recovered,
together with such inexhaustible details of its political, social, and
religious life that the antique Hindu world really stands epitomised in
them. The Old Testament is not more interwoven with the Jewish race, nor
the New Testament with the civilisation of Christendom, nor the Koran with
the records and destinies of Islam, than are these two Sanskrit poems--the
Mahabharata and Ramayana--with that unchanging and teeming population which
Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, rules as Empress of Hindustan. The stories,
songs, and ballads, the histories and genealogies, the nursery tales and
religious discourses, the art, the learning, the philosophy, the creeds,
the moralities, the modes of thought; the very phrases, sayings, turns of
expression, and daily ideas of the Hindu people, are taken from these
poems. Their children and their wives are named out of them; so are their
cities, temples, streets, and cattle. They have constituted the library,
the newspaper, and the Bible--generation after generation--to all the
succeeding and countless millions of Indian people; and it replaces
patriotism with that race and stands in stead of nationality to possess
these two precious and inexhaustible books, and to drink from them as from
mighty and overflowing rivers. The value ascribed in Hindustan to these yet
little-known epics has transcended all literary standards established in
the West. They are personified, worshipped, and cited from as something
divine. To read or even listen t