GO On the Ballads and Legends of the 'Punjab. [No. 1. 



bad sent bad critics to spoil a dainty dish ; and ere scholastic 

 prosers had discovered the wondrons secret of drilling essays too 

 heavy and lame for prose, into the goose step of verse. To please 

 their audience, it was necessary to be ever alive. No learned dis- 

 sertations, no elaborate arguments were required by the unschooled 

 circle. They were children of nature with some strange exaggerated 

 notions of the unseen world. But even their monstrous puppets 

 moved with the ease of nature, and every deviation from her harmo- 

 nious laws, was felt and resented as a blemish ; and the slumber of 

 the audience and their neglect of the minstrel were unmistakeable 

 warnings that his style must be changed. 



The interest I have ever felt in listening to these old traditionary 

 lays is not easily described. I remember, that it is the music to 

 which have thrilled the hearts of a nation during centuries of unre- 

 corded years. And I cannot but think that every scanty relic of 

 this first poetry of a people, is worthy of rescue from oblivion at the 

 expence of considerable pains. 



It is impossible to touch upon any tradition of the Doaba* of the 

 Indus and Jelum, without anxiously searching for traces of the 

 vanished race of the Indo and Scytho Greeks whose coins and gems 

 meet us in every old deserted site. This indeed forms the chief 

 spell of every such research. That people, who burst in upon the 

 darkness of barbarism accomplished in all the elegant arts of the 

 most refined civility, to a degree unequalled by their successors in 

 the lapse of 2000 years ! What a strange spell of darkness and 

 oblivion rests upon their annals of light, upon their past exploits, 

 upon their ultimate destiny. It seems utterly unaccountable, that 

 the multiplied descendants of those few but matchless conquerors, 

 who, isolated from support by thousands of miles of desert and 

 myriads of warlike foes, could yet maintain for a thousand years or 

 more their supremacy in a foreign land ; should thus totally have 

 vanished from the face of the earth, leaving none to claim the proud 

 title of offspring of the t Kings of Kings. 



* For the general English Reader, Doaba is a tract between two rivers. We 

 have no English equivalent, and therefore it is worthy of adoption into the lan- 

 guage. 



t Kings of kings— jBacriAeuo-s fkurtkew is the Title generally borne upon their 



