nor monument found to back them;--never mind; dates you
count eras from are generally those in which important cycles
begin. The legends relate to Vikramaditya king of Ujjain,--which
kingdom is towards the western side of the peninsula, and about
where Hindoostan and the Deccan join. He is the Arthur-Charlemain
of India, the Golden Monarch of Romance. In the lakes of his
palace gardens the very swans sang his praises daily--

"Glory be to Vikramajeet
Who always gives us pearls to eat";

and when he died, the four pillars that supported his throne rose
up, and wandered away through the fields and jungle disconsolate:
they would not support the dignity of any lesser man.* Such
tales are told about him by every Indian mother to her children
at this present day, and have been, presumably, any time these
last two thousand years.

------
* _India through the Ages,_ by Mrs. Flora Annie Steel.
------

Of his real existence Historical Research cannot satisfy itself
at all;--or it half guesses it may have discovered his probable
original wandering in disguise through the centuries of a
thousand years or so later. But you must expect that sort of
thing in India.

At his court, says tradition, lived the "Nine Gems of Literature,"
--chief among them the poet-dramatist Kalidasa; whom Historical
Research (western) rather infers lived at several widely
separated epochs much nearer our own day. Well; for the
time being let us leave Historical Research (western) to stew in
its own (largely poisonous) juices, and see how it likes it,--and
say that there are good cyclic chances of something large here,
in the half-cycle between the Ages of Han Wuti and Augustus.

We may note that things Indian must be dealt with differently
from things elsewhere. You take, for example, the old story
about the Moslem conquerors of Egypt burning the Alexandrian
Library. The fact that this is mentioned for the first time by a
Christian who lived six hundred years after the supposed event,
while we have many histories written during those six hundred
years which say nothing about it at all,--is evidence amounting
to proof that it never happened; especially when you take into
account the known fact that the Alexandrian Library had already
been thoroughly burnt several times. But you can derive no such
negativing certainty, in India, from the fact that Vikramaditya
and Ujjain and Kalidasa may never have been mentioned together,
n