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mistake in India than it would be in Europe. The poets who sang of Vishnu in early times simply sum- moned all people to join in one dance and prayer to Hari, and, in joining -so, to abjure all distinctions of caste, rank, and even sex to which the usage of the world had wedded them. So did Queen Mird invite her royal husband to come and join her in dancing and
. praying in love and honour to his and her one common Lord.
The impulses to morality under the influence of this poetry were as greatas the fascinations it afforded by its constructive powers, by its widest and most practical assertion of human equality, and by the philosophical charms underlying it as its goal. It was unfortunate that the matt&r passed into the hands of Vallabh. But even then he had not the whole victory to himself. His missionaries would have overrun Gujarat earlier, for the work of its first poets had predisposed the country in that direction. But the country was indebted to the three great poets of the seventeenth century for having successfully prevented them from crawling like so many
. worms on the body social of Gujardt. What the social and moral work of these three poets was need not be repeated. After they were laid in the dust, numerous religious sects arose in Gujardt, and it was then that the poets had the hardest grapple. The poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have no
