o me now.[4] After this, the pre-eminently wise Maharaja
expired, stretched on his bed, in the act of gazing on the Mahatupo."[5]

[Footnote 1: _Mahawanso_, ch. xxxii.]

[Footnote 2: _Mahawanso_, ch. xxiv, xxv.]

[Footnote 3: _Mahawanso_, ch. xxxii.]

[Footnote 4: _Mahawanso_, ch. xxxii.]

[Footnote 5: Another name for the Ruanwelle dagoba, which he had built.]

CHAP. VI.

THE INFLUENCE OF BUDDHISM ON CIVILISATION.

[Sidenote: B.C. 137.]

After the reign of Dutugaimunu there is little in the pages of the
native historians to sustain interest in the story of the Singhalese
monarchs. The long line of sovereigns is divided into two distinct
classes; the kings of the _Maha-wanse_ or "superior dynasty" of the
uncontaminated blood of Wijayo, who occupied the throne from his death,
B.C. 505, to that of Maha Sen, A.D. 302;--and the _Sulu-wanse_ or
"inferior race," whose descent was less pure, but who, amidst invasions,
revolutions, and decline, continued, with unsteady hand, to hold the
government clown to the occupation of the island by Europeans in the
beginning of the sixteenth century.

[Sidenote: B.C. 137.]

To the great dynasty, and more especially to its earliest members, the
inhabitants were indebted for the first rudiments of civilisation, for
the arts of agricultural life, for an organised government, and for a
system of national worship. But neither the piety of the kings nor their
munificence sufficed to conciliate the personal attachment of their
subjects, or to strengthen their throne by national attachment such as
would have fortified its occupant against the fatalities incident to
despotism. Of fifty-one sovereigns who formed the pure Wijayan dynasty,
two were deposed by their subjects, and nineteen put to death by their
successors.[1] Excepting the rare instances in which a reign was marked
by some occurrence, such as an invasion and repulse of the Malabars,
there is hardly a sovereign of the "Solar race" whose name is associated
with a higher achievement than the erection of a dagoba or the formation
of a tank, nor one whose story is enlivened by an event more exciting
than the murder through which he mounted the throne or the conspiracy by
which he was driven from it.[2]

[Footnote 1: There is something very striking in the facility with which
aspirants to the throne obtained the instant acquiescence of the people,
so soon as assassination had put them in possession of power. And this
i