marriage that such a bride should have such a
bridegroom is truly wonderful."

"Other Brahmans then present said;
' O king, at the marriage hour, in sign of
joy, the sacred shell is blown, but thou hast
no need of that.' " (Alluding to the
donkey's braying.)

"The women all cried out, ' O my
mother! what is this? At the time of
marriage to have an ass! "What a miserable
thing! "What! Will he give that angelic
girl in wedlock to a donkey?' '

"At length Grandharba-Sena, addressing
the king in Sanskrit, urged him to perform
his promise. He reminded his future
father-in-law that there is no act more
meritorious than speaking truth; that the
mortal frame is a mere dress; and that
wise men never estimate the value of a
person by his clothes. He added that he
was in that shape from the curse of his
sire, and that during the night he had the
body of a man. Of his being the son of
Indra there could be no doubt. Hearing
the donkey thus speak Sanskrit—for it
was never known that an ass could
discourse in that classical tongue—the minds
of the people were changed, and they
confessed that, although he had asinine form,
he was unquestionably the son of Indra.
The king, therefore, gave him his daughter
in marriage."

The son of this man-donkey, or donkey-
man, Grandharba-Sena, and the Princess
of Dhara, therefore the grandson of Indra,
was the great soldier-king Vikramanditya,
or Sun of Heroism, " Vikram " meaning
valour or prowess, the King Arthur, the
Charlemagne, the Harun el Rashid of
India. (We follow Captain Burton, who
presumably knows what he is about, in the
spelling of our old friend's name.) Before
the Sun of Heroism's birth Gandharba-Sena
promised him the strength of a thousand
male elephants; but Indra swore an oath that
he would never be born; whereupon his
mother stabbed herself, and Vikram, as he is
called for short— it is lucky for him he did
not get curtailed to Vik—came into the
world on his own account, and so saved his
grandfather's oath. In conclusion,
perhaps as some sort of compensation, Indra,
to whom the little Sun of Heroism was
taken, had compassion on him, adopted him,
and gave him a good education: which last
fact is an example which all irate but
influential grandfathers ought to follow.

We come now to two quasi-historical
and decidedly less mythical accounts of
Vikram; one which makes him the second,
the other the eldest, son of his father. In
the first account, of course, he murdered
his elder brother, Shank, as all wise young
princes, in India, do. For though he was
protected by grandpapa Indra, and
endowed by Father Gandharba-Sena with the
strength of a thousand male elephants, still
as the younger brother of the reigning
monarch he would not have found things
quite to his taste. The second account
makes him the eldest son of Gandharba-
Sena, of whom the most that posterity has
to say is, that he became an ass, married
four queens, and had six sons: each of
whom was more powerful and learned than
the other; and that when he, Gandharba,
died, Vikram and his younger brother,
Bhartarihari, received some excellent
advice from their worthy grandfather about
mastering everything; which, as Captain
Burton says, is a sure way not to succeed
in anything. Without going into the list
of their required accomplishments, suffice
it to say, they were to be models of
morality, and inexhaustible wells of learning;
the outcome of which was that
Vikram, when he had become a monarch
on his own account, meditated deeply on
what is said of monarchs. "A king is
fire and air; he is both sun and moon; he
is the god of criminal justice; he is the
genius of wealth; he is the regent of
water; he is the lord of the firmament;
he is a powerful divinity who appears in
human shape." He reflected with some
satisfaction that the scriptures had made
him absolute, had left the lives and
properties of all his subjects to his arbitrary
will, had pronounced him to be an incarnate
deity, and had threatened to punish with
death even ideas derogatory to his honour.

His kingship, however, despite its power
and glory, was no sinecure practically;
and what between the necessity of swallowing
a mithridatic every morning on the
saliva, or, as we say, on an empty stomach;
of making the cooks taste every dish they
had prepared before he would touch a
morsel of it; of being fully armed when
he received strangers; and of having even
women searched for concealed weapons,
before they were admitted to him, his life
must have been anxious as well as busy.
Pedantically marked out, and wearisomely
monotonous, it certainly was. The result
of it all was, it must be confessed, a well-
ordered kingdom, where no one was
oppressed, and where all had equal justice;
where the innocent were protected, and
offenders inexorably punished: whereby the