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harmony. Akho warns himself against raving like the poets who take the world as true, who thunder, like clouds, not in order to rain, but to show the possibility of adown-pour. It rains only when it is time for it. Then there are those people who think Sanskrit is all in all! There is no divine charm in any particular langu- age. He who comes out triumphant, isthe hero. You can’t lose by speaxking your Vernacular nor gain by speaking Sanskrit. On the other hand it is the vernacu- lar that is the wooden bow that propels the arrow of Sanskrit; it is the principal sum on which Sanskrit accrues as interest. Language is simply a network of the 52 letters of the alphabet, and, the real substance lies. in the 58rd thing: where language ends, substance- begins. To what extent the pithy and powerful writings from which the above few samples are drawn, made- themselves felt when they were written and read under the poet's own eyes, it is difficult to say after this long lapse and barrier of time. If the poets that lived in his time- are an index of their age, it is clear that the seventeenth century was the age in which pure poetry and philosophy preponderated over the artificial religions which had: grown up during the previous centuries. For reasons which will have to be mentioned further on the succeed- ing age was one of retrogression wherein the good and new influence of this century seems apparently to have- been obliterated. But even now Akho, though not-
