stories are arranged in differoirt order and in more eon- 

 deiiiSed forrii than those of the Panchatsntra. 



Twoi points concerning these f abloR are \\'orth raention : 

 their migrations, and their service in directing anew men's, 

 attention to the forgotten treasures of Indian learnmg. The 

 Bible and one or two other work^ excepted, no other bookij 

 have had so widespread a circulation as these Indian fabie 

 books. Tliey have been translated into Pehlevi (the speech 

 of ancient Persia), into Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Latm, 

 Spanish, Italian, English, French — in a word, into^ all the 

 chief living ver-nacular tongues of the western world, and 

 those of India and the east. The historj' of Indian fables 

 is itself a fair-y tale. Parts, of the storj' have been told by 

 Horace Hayman V/ilson, Lancereau, Muller and Lanman, 

 And whoever may care to read the whole story can find it 

 complete in Benfey's introduction to his version of the 

 Panchatantra, a volume of six hundred and odd pages. 

 Benfey's. book is an invaluable contribution to the history 

 of fiction, to be thankfully read, albeit of the type George 

 Eliot called "A monument of Genu an skill, with all the 

 builders' scaffolding left standing after the structure is fin- 

 ifshed." Jacobs says that Benfey traced each tale in it« 

 wanderings witli an amount of erudition which is phenome- 

 nal even in the land of erudition. 



A score of Englisli traaislations, more or leise enthe, 

 give versions of these fables. Tiiat knowxr as the fa.blesf — - 

 or a part of the fables^ — of Bidpay, Pilpay, or the moral 

 philosophy of Doni, variant titles of the- same book, was 

 made by Sir Thcmae North as far back a.s- 1569-70. Like 

 his translation of Amyots' Plutarch, used by Shakespeare, 

 it is lucid, vigorous, and holds the reader with that force- 

 ful .spell peculiar to Elizabethan prose.- Of the Hitopadesa 

 there are full English translations by Wilkins, Sir William 

 Jones, Johnson, Sir Edwin iUnold, and by.Ma^ ]M idler. 

 The Hitopadesa was the first Indian text printed in Nagari 

 characters'. Golebrooke wrote an introduction describing its 

 histoi-y.. It was print-ed at Serampofe by Carey, the v--hilom 



tS 



