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be uhder no such necessity of passing off poetty for- religion and he turned his freedom to good account. He wrote a large number of poems, all fictions, in which he constructed for his audience a new world of men and women who soared above the narrowminded and blasting social institutions of his countrymen, and he revelled in pointing out and picturing to them modes of living which made his characters, parent. and child, man and woman, meet each other upon terms Of independence and toleration which could have had no place under the social prejudice sand practices of his countrymen. We, Hindus of this generation, may well spenk of free and advanced societies and of social reform by looking at our rulers, but the idea of a world of people living in that’ way could only have been conceived and Yrodied forth with such realistic vividness by nothing shottof the powerful imagination ofan original 4nd prduttte genius, when we remember that it was worked owsin that manner by a Brahman of Gujarat in the gdvénteenth century when neither the rulers nor the ruléd‘could exhibit more than a picture of gloomy sociat yéstrictions. We are not able at this day to say whether society in Gujarat was more free in the days of Samat than it is now or was before the beginning of this ge- _ Warétion. There is, no doubt, the fact of the poet Premanand having had a number of ladies as a part of IM& séhidol of poets. But the direction in which Akho
