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genuine poetry without any substantial subservience to religion. Had peaceand prosperity allowed further develop- ment to the nation, the lines on which progress had been commenced by this poetical trio and by the thirty-seven disciples of Premanand would have proved no insigni- ficant factor in giving a very healthy tone to society, and modern Gujacit would have been acountry of healthier and truer souls than the masses now are init. But fortune wished it otherwise. The close of the reign of the Emperor Shah Jehan and the succession of Aurang- zebe were events not only baneful in themselves, but they were attended with and followed by the rise of the depredatory hordes of the Marathas, whose advent boded no good to a country of merchants and poets.
The beginning of the eighteenth century was mark- ed by areign of confusion in Gujarat. The viceroys and commanders of Aurangzebe were neither trusted by their sovereign nor by each other; and, as among them- selves the one was set as a spy upon and a destroyer of the other, they turned Gujarat into their field of battle and intrigue. To confound confusion worse, the various Maratha chieftains followed similar ways in this pro- vince and their desultory and hide-and-seek mode of warfare with each other, and with the disunited Moghul generals, helped to spread an universal conflagration of war and plunder throughout the length and. breadth of Gujarat. It was only in 1782, after a continued war of
