lessened force. Pure poetry ceased to be breathed as such, but several new religions found it possible or conve- nient to grow up during these dark times and took their nourishment from the poetry of bygone ages. The im- mortal souls of Narasinha and Mira and Premanand and Akho, which had formerly shone like whole planets, were now broken up into numerous asteroids. These little poets and poetasters crowd upon the horizon and grow thicker in numbers as the eighteenth century draws toa close and the nineteenth dawns.
These poets bear evident traces of inheritance of instincts from the oneor the other of the great poets of the previous centuries. But the instincts are in all cases overshadowed by the reasonings and beliefs of one or the other of the numerous religions that were allon a sudden poured upon the country from within and without. On the north of Gujardt is Mewar, the kingdom of Mira’s busband. The faith which this lady had adopted, like her contemporary Narasinha Mehta, was the religion of Vishnu, and in her lifetime the royal religion of Mewar was different from hers, and she had to fly to Gujarat to escape both intrigue and persecution. But Mewar was destined to adopt her faith with a vengeance, Vallabhacharya, the founder of the sect which acquired notoriety by the Maharaj Libel case at Bombay, was born in 1479, being just the time when both Mira and
Narasinha Mehta had (closed their careers. Vallabh 5
