1835.] Notes on the preceding Inscription. 3S<? 



well known among us as the Platonic, of theUniVerse existing in archetype 

 as ideas in the divine mind, before the material creation ; in the words 

 of our Spenser, 



What time this world's great Workmaister did cast 



To make al things such as we now behold, 



It seems that he before his eyes had plast 



A goodly paterne, to whose perfect mold 



He fashioned them, as comely as he could, 



That now so faire and seemely they appear© 



As nought may be conceived any where. 



That wondrous paterne, wheresoei-e it bee, 



Whether in earth laid up in secret store, 



Or else in heaven, that no man may it see 



With sinfull eyes, for fear it to deflore, 



Is perfect Beauty, which all men adore : 



Whose face and feature doth so much excell 



All mortal sense, that none the same may tell. 

 Or as in the remarkable lines in Boethius, (Consol. Phil. lib. 3,) which 

 embody the whole doctrine of the Timaeus on this subject, the gene- 

 ration and also the destruction of the material world. 



Tu cuncta superno 



Ducis ab exemplo ; pulchrum pulcherrimua ipse 



Mundum mente gerens, similique in imagine formans ; 



Tu causis animas paribus vitasque minores 



Provehis, et levibus sublimes curribus aptans, 



In ccelum, terramque seris ; quas lege benigna 



Ad te conversas reduci facis igne reverti. 

 The transition of the ideas of the Divine mind into separate individual 

 intelligences (from which Apuleixjs and others derive the whole theory of 

 Polytheism) — the propagation ofvarious orders of beings from these, down 

 to the grossest and most material; and the destruction of the world by the 

 absorption of the lower in the higher existences, till all is lost in the Su- 

 preme — are points in which the Hindu schemes (as partially unfolded in 

 the present verse) wonderfully coincide with Platonism. They are parallel 

 corruptions of one great original truth, which in the quotations here given, 

 appears with scarcely any mixture of error. 



VII. — XII. The local legend in these verses has been already men- 

 tioned. The destruction of" him of the incomparable arrows," the Hindu 

 God of Love, thence called Ananga, or Atanu, the Bodiless One-^-as 

 alluded to in the turgid and somewhat obscure expression of the Vlllth, 

 is a favorite subject with the poets of India, and is told at large by Cali- 

 da'sa in the 3d book of the Cumdra Sambhava. An equivoque seems intend- 

 ed in the first line between one of these names of Ca'ma, and the adjective 

 ^rf«! " large or immense :" but as the former meaning would involve an 

 insipid repetition, it is discarded in the translation. 



