52 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
plaintive song of the nightingale,, amid the gloom and 
loneliness of night. 
As Madura was a sort of focal spot, where the pil- 
grimages met from all parts of India, to the celebrated 
sanctuary on the island of Ramisseram, Trimal Naig 
was determined to erect an edifice that should he 
worthy of such a sacred concourse; and sensible, 
moreover, of the extreme veneration paid to any 
sculptured representation of their favourite deities, 
by placing them in connexion with the effigies of his 
own ancestors before the eyes of the devotees, whose 
minds, when about to visit their grand shrine, were 
always excited to a high degree of devotional en- 
thusiasm, he was fully aware that he should divide 
their reverence, and attain for his progenitors, and for 
himself eventually, a sort of popular canonization. 
Thus, his ambition, though disguised under the plausi- 
ble mask of public spirit and veneration for the sanc- 
tity of religion, was the mainspring of those splendid 
erections which have immortalized his name in the 
native chronicles of the southern peninsula of India. 
The choultry, of which Mr. Daniell has given so 
faithful a representation, is in the form of a parallelo- 
gram, three hundred and twelve feet in length, by one 
hundred and twenty-five in width. It consists of 
one vast hall, the ceiling of which is supported by six 
rows of columns twenty-five feet high, most of which 
are formed of single stones, and the whole composed 
of a hard grey granite. The labour in carving these 
immense masses must have been prodigious, especially 
with the rude tools employed by the native workmen, 
and when the inflexibility of the material upon which 
