4 Of Two Land-grants, issued by King Hastin. [No. 1, 
of opinion ; and it will be perceived that, in expounding them 
I decline Professor Wilson’s rendering of their cardinal expressions. 
thing of the past. Ordinary meanings which it has — all of them metaphorical of 
‘eating’ — are ‘used,’ ‘worn,’ ‘fconsumed,’ ‘disbursed,’ ‘expended.’ In the 
older of Hastin’s grants the phrase is which, like ijTJT, may si gmfy> 
vi 
« tenure,’ ‘ inoumbency ;’ other customary senses of it being, at the same time 
‘ dissipation,’ ‘ waste,’ destruction.’ In order to substantiate the counter-posi- 
tion to that which I take touching the acceptation of Wyfi, and as 
Vi Vi 
chronologically bearing, in the phraseology of inscriptions, on the state of an 
empire, it must be made out that, in other writings of the same nature, these 
words imply duration to the period particularized. 
The partiality of the Hindus to euphemism is notorious j and it is, therefore, 
not surprising that where, as in the Kahaun inscription, reference is made to an 
era determined by the annihilation of a series of powerful princes that diction 
which is least dyslogistic should be studiously selected. Congruously with 
such avoidance of an invidious term as has been indicated, it is likewise not at 
all singular that a direct encomium should be bestowed on a potentate who, 
however truculently he may once have lorded it, having been dust and ashes 
nearly a century and a half, could be favourably commemorated without 
antagonism to the impulses of family pride and without hazard of irritating 
popular prejudice. Pending the emergence, as established historical entities, of 
dynastic successors to Skanda, it will, then, be perfectly safe to look upon him 
as the last of the Guptas. Even should it transpire that he was survived by 
descendants who were not entirely disendowed of power, yet in him, so far as 
we are informed, the lustre of his lineage underwent definitive and irremediablo 
eclipse. On collation of the wording of Hastin’s grants with that of the Kahaun 
pillar, we thus discover no trifling corroboration of the statement derived from 
the Arabian traveller : and his language, in passing, will endure no alternative 
construction. 
Skanda Gupta’s inscription is in the measure known as SragdJtard. In 
extracting the figures from the third verse of its first stanza, as 133, Mr. Prinsep 
imagined that he followed the original in putting % for the fifth syllable. In so 
doing, he has broken the metre. His reading, prosody apart, required ^ ; but 
there was less than this, he saw, in his facsimile. And, again, ‘ two,’ would in 
right Sanskrit, be expressed, in the place where he meant to impose it, by 
^j] > not by his The true numeral is ‘ ten.’ Once more, only a few 
words before the error here redressed, ho read, for -jjjsff, which is in his 
facsimile, •jptifl : “ after the decease” or “ of the repose, i. e., death,” — of 
Skanda Gupta, — in allocation to “ in the year.” See this Journal, for 1838, 
pp. 37, 38. 
