ban, where he had an interview with Nábhá Jí; he settled there and strenuously advocated the worship of Sitá Ráma, in preference to that of Rádhá Krishan."
On comparing this sketch with the literal translation of the text from which it was derived, it will be seen that it is not very closely in accord with it. It omits many particulars and adds others, and was probably taken not from the genuine Hindi poem itself, but from some modern prose adaptation,[1] of which, in consequence of the difficulty of the original, there are very many in existence.
It is a curious illustration of the indifference to historical truth and the love for the marvellous, by which the Hindú mind has always been characterized, that although the tika even of the Bhakt-Málá was written less than a century after the poet's death, it still gives so little trustworthy information about the real incidents of his life and supplies so much that is clearly fictitious. That it was his wife who first persuaded him to exchange an earthly for a divine love and to devote himself to the service of Ráma may well be accepted as a fact. As to the other legends—of the ghost who introduced him to Hanumán, through whom he obtained a vision of Ráma and Lakshman; of the murderer whom he recognized as cleansed of his crime by the repetition of the holy name; of the widow on her way to the funeral pile, whose husband he restored to life; of the emperor's requiring him to perform some miracle and, on his refusal to produce the god to whom he aseribed all his power, throwing him into prison, from which he was delivered by Hanumán's monkey host; of the emperor's thereupon abandoning a spot which Ráma had made so peculiarily his own; of the thieves who were prevented from breaking into the poet's house by Ráma himself acting as watchman; of his visit to Brindá-ban and his interview with Nábhá Ji; and finally of his persistence in preferring the worship of Ráma to that of Krishna, though the latter assured him in person that there was no difference between the two—all these legends, as given in the Blakt-Málá, whatever their foundation, are still popularly accepted as verities and are indissolubly connected with the poet's name. A few further facts of more
- ↑ I have since beon able to verify this conjecture, as Mr. Leonard, the Assistant Secretary of the Calcutta Asiatic Society, was kind encugh to lend me his copy of Price's Hindi and Hindustáni Selections, a work to which Professor Wilson refers more than once in the course of his essay. It was published in Calcutta in 1827 and has long been out of print. I find that as many as 50 pages of it are occupied with extracts from the Bhakt-málá; but with the exception of some 18 stanzas from the mûl of Náblhá Jí, all the rest is in simple narrative prose; and the compiler in his introduction specially mentions that the work itself wes rarely to be met with in the lower provinces, and that his extracts were taken from a copy in Mr. Wiison's library. [Sanskrit aud Hindi being two languages, as distinct as Latin and Italian, the above remarks were never intended (as a reviewer wrongly supposed) to detract in any way from tbe peculiar merits of one of the greatest Sanskrit scholars that England has ever produced and to whose works no one is more indebted than myself].
