36 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
offered to the pilgrims, in their periodical visitations 
to the shrine at Ramisseram, that he is indebted 
for the reverence with which his name - has been 
handed down to a degenerate but grateful posterity. 
From the Mahomedan conquest we may date the 
decay of Hindoo learning, and the destruction of the 
fairest monuments of ancient Hindoo art. It was 
not, however, until the worshippers of the Arabian 
imposter obtained a footing in the southern part of 
the Indian peninsula, and more especially under the 
tyranny of Aurungzeb, that Madura became a prey 
to the ravages of these bigoted and unsparing con- 
querors. 
Aurungzeb, who was an intolerant bigot, and a 
furious Iconoclast, thought it an act of religious obli- 
gation to lay the arm of demolition upon every temple 
in which a heathen deity was enshrined. Thus some 
of the finest monuments of Hindoo antiquity were 
either unsparingly mutilated, or levelled with the 
dust. Much, however, as the bigotry of these Islam 
invaders had done to wipe from the fair chronicles of 
time those noble records of man’s ingenuity and enter- 
prise, which were once the pride of the enlightened, 
and are now the boast of the half-civilized Hindoo, 
nevertheless the glorious ruins scattered over the face 
of one of the noblest countries upon earth attest the 
triumph of human ingenuity, in an age too when the 
forests with which barbarized Britain was overspread 
were peopled with a race of savages, and in a country, 
no less truly than poetically designated “ the land of 
the sun,” where now the mental superiority of the 
descendants of the conquerors of those savages has 
