1871 .] 
The Country of J3raj. 
45 
duly honoured with a visit, the weary pilgrims finally recross the 
stream, and sit down to rest at the point from which they started, 
the Yisrant Ghat, the holiest place in the holy city of Mathura. 
As shewn in the above narrative, many of the incidents to 
which the attention of the pilgrims is directed in the course 
of the perambulation refer to Krishna’s amours with Padha, 
and accordingly have no place in the original Pauranik le¬ 
gends, where Padha is barely mentioned even by name. It 
would seem that the earliest literary authority for these popular 
interpolations is no Sanskrit work whatever, but a Hindi poem, 
entitled the Braj Bilas, written by one Brajbasi Das, so recently as 
the middle of last century A* He represents his work as derived 
from the Puranas, which except in the main outlines it certainly 
is not; and as he mentions no other source of information, it may 
be presumed that he had none beyond his own invention and some 
floating local traditions which he was the first to reduce into a 
connected series. A striking illustration of the essentially modern 
character of orthodox Hinduism, despite its persistent claim to 
rigid inflexibility and immemorial prescription. 
# The precise date, Sambat 1800, or 1743 A. D., is given in the following 
line—* Sambat subh puran sat jano<T IJSf '5TTWT. 
