, came Skandagupta; and with him, the
White Huns. He defeated them on a large scale in the fifties;
but they returned again and again to the attack; during the next
thirty years their pressure was breaking up the empire; till
when Skandagupta died in 480, it fell to pieces.

XXIII. "THE DRAGON, THE APOSTATE, THE GREAT MIND"

The time is the middle of the fourth century A.D. The top of the
Crest-Wave is in India, now the greatest country in the world.
The young Samudragupta, about thirty years old now, has been
filling the whole peninsula with his renown as warrior, poet,
conqueror, patron of arts and letters, musician. The Hindus are
a busy and efficient people, masterly in this material world.
Their colonies are spread over Java, Sumatra, and the other
islands; Formosa (think where it lies) has a Sanskrit, but not
yet (so far as we know) a Chinese, name; all those seas are
filled with Indian shipping.--And with Arab shipping, too, by the
way; or are coming to be so; and spray of the Wave (in the
shape of Indian and Arab ships) is falling in the port of Canton.
But China as a whole is in a deep trough of sea: an intriguing,
ceremonious, ultra-elegant, and wily-weak court and dynasty have
lately been expelled from precarious sovereignty at Changan in
the North to Nankin south of the Yangtse; there to abide a
little while un-overturned, looking down in lofty impotent
contempt on the uncouth Wether Huns, Tunguses, and Tibetans
who are sharing and quarreling over the ancient seats of the
Black-haired People in the Hoangho basin, after driving this same
precious House of Tsin into the south.--Persia is on the back of
the Wave, something lower than the Crest: Sapor II, a dozen or
so years older than Samudragupta, has been on the throne since
some months before his (Sapor's) birth; and has now grown up
into a particularly vigorous monarch; conquering here and there;
persecuting the Christians with renewed energy since Constantine
took them into favor;--and of late years unmercifully banging
about Constantius son of Constantine in the open field, and
besieging and sometimes taking his fortresses. This, you may
say, with one hand: with the other he has been very busy with
his neighbors in the north-east, the nomads; he has been
punishing them a little; and incidentally founding, as a
protection against their in roads, the city of New Sapor in
Khorassan,--famed later as Nai-shapur, and the birthplace of a
ce