r says
(_L.V.R.W._, 148):

"The prettiest girlish faces peep modestly out of these
curtained bailis, and did one not know that in India an
unveiled face is never an innocent one, the fact
certainly could not be divined from their looks or
behavior." It happens to be the fashion even for
bayaderes to preserve an appearance of great propriety
in public.

[273] Pp. 143 and 160 of Kellner's edition of this drama (Reclam). The
extent to which indifference to chastity is sometimes carried in India
may be inferred from the facts that in the famous city of Vasali
"marriage was forbidden, and high rank attached to the lady who held
office as the chief of courtesans;" and that the same condition
prevails in British India to this day in a town in North Canara
(Balfour, _Cyclop. of India_, II., 873).

[274] Hala's date is somewhat uncertain, but he flourished between the
third and fourth centuries A.D. Professor Weber's translation of his
seven hundred poems, with the professor's comments, takes up no fewer
than 1,023 pages of the _Abhandlungen fuer die Kunde des Morgenlandes_,
Vols. V. and VII. I have selected all those which throw light on the
Hindoo conception of love, and translated them carefully from Weber's
version. Hala's anthology served as prototype, about the twelfth
century, to a similar collection of arya verses, the erotic Saptacati
of Govardhana, also seven hundred in number, but written in Sanskrit.
Of these I have not been able to find a version in a language that I
can read, but the other collection is copious and varied enough to
cover all the phases of Hindoo love. The verses were intended, as
already indicated, to be sung, for the Hindoos, too, knew the power of
music as a pastime and a feeder of the emotions. "If music be the food
of love, play on," says the English Shakespere, and the "Hindoo
Shakespere" wrote more than a thousand years before him:

"Oh, how beautifully our master Rebhila has sung! Yes,
indeed, the zither is a pearl, only it does not come
from the depths of the sea. How its tones accord with
the heart that longs for love, how it helps to while
away time at a rendezvous, how it assuages the grief of
separation, and augments the delights of the lovers!"
(_Vasantasena_, Act III., 2.)

[275] The disadvantage of arguing against the believers in primitive,
Oriental, and ancient amorous sentiment is that some of the strong