late Dr. Buehler, an attempt was made to prevent the further
expansion of the work. The contents of the Epic were described in
some prefatory verses, and the number of couplets in each Book was
stated. The total number of couplets, according to this metrical
preface, is about eighty-five thousand. But the limit so fixed
has been exceeded in still later centuries; further additions and
interpolations have been made; and the Epic as printed and published
in Calcutta in this century contains over ninety thousand couplets,
excluding the Supplement about the Race of Hari.

The modern reader will now understand the reason why this great
Epic--the greatest work of imagination that Asia has produced--has
never yet been put before the European reader in a readable form. A
poem of ninety thousand couplets, about seven times the size of the
Iliad and the Odyssey put together, is more than what the average
reader can stand; and the heterogeneous nature of its contents does
not add to the interest of the work. If the religious works of
Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, the
commentaries of Blackstone and the ballads of Percy, together with
the tractarian writings of Newman, Keble, and Pusey, were all thrown
into blank verse and incorporated with the Paradise Lost, the reader
would scarcely be much to blame if he failed to appreciate that
delectable compound. A complete translation of the _Maha-bharata_
therefore into English verse is neither possible nor desirable, but
portions of it have now and then been placed before English readers
by distinguished writers. Dean Milman's graceful rendering of the
story of Nala and Damayanti is still read and appreciated by a select
circle of readers; and Sir Edwin Arnold's beautiful translation of
the concluding books of the Epic is familiar to a larger circle of
Englishmen. A complete translation of the Epic into English prose has
also been published in India, and is useful to Sanscrit scholars for
the purpose of reference.

But although the old Epic had thus been spoilt by unlimited
expansion, yet nevertheless the leading incidents and characters of
the real Epic are still discernible, uninjured by the mass of foreign
substance in which they are embedded--even like those immortal marble
figures which have been recovered from the ruins of an ancient world,
and now beautify the museums of modern Europe. For years past I have
thought that it was perhaps not impossib