) Pub(lis)
stare. Please encourage him." Later Arbuthnot, in reply to a question
put to him by a friend, said that the Society consisted practically of
himself, Sir Richard Burton and the late Lord Houghton. [402]

Chapter XXVI. The Ananga Ranga or Lila Shastra

Bibliography:

70. The Book of the Sword. 1884.

116. The Ananga Ranga. [403]

The title page of the second book, the Ananga Ranga, which was issued in
1885, was as follows:

ANANGA RANGA
(Stage of the Bodiless One)
or
THE HINDU ART OF LOVE
(Ars Amoris Indica)
Translated from the Sanskrit
and annotated
by
A. F. F. and B. F. R.

Cosmopoli MDCCCLXXXV, for the Kama Shastra Society of London and
Benares, and for private circulation only.

Dedicated to that small portion of the British Public which takes
enlightened interest in studying the manners and customs of the olden
East.

We are told that this book was written about 1450 by the arch-poet
Kalyana Mull, [404] that lithographed copies have been printed by
hundreds of thousands, that the book is in the hands of almost every
one "throughout the nearer East," and also that it is "an ethnological
treasure, which tells us as much of Hindu human nature as The Thousand
Nights and a Night of Arab manners and customs in the cinquecento."
In India the book is known as the Kama Shastra or Lila Shastra, the
Scripture of Play or Amorous Sport. The author says quaintly, "It is
true that no joy in the world of mortals can compare with that derived
from the knowledge of the Creator. Second, however, and subordinate only
to his are the satisfaction and pleasure arising from the possession of
a beautiful woman."

"From the days of Sotades and Ovid," says the writer of the Preface, who
is certainly Burton, "to our own time, Western authors have treated
the subject either jocularly or with a tendency to hymn the joys of
immorality, and the gospel of debauchery. The Indian author has taken
the opposite view, and it is impossible not to admire the delicacy
with which he has handled an exceedingly difficult theme. ....Feeling
convinced that monogamy is a happier state than polygamy, he would
save the married couple from the monotony and satiety which follow
possession, by varying their pleasures in every conceivable way and by
supplying them with the means of being psychically pure and phys