tury before Christ.
For generations and centuries after the war its main incidents must
have been sung by bards and minstrels in the courts of Northern
India. The war thus became the centre of a cycle of legends, songs,
and poems in ancient India, even as Charlemagne and Arthur became the
centres of legends in mediaeval Europe. And then, probably under
the direction of some enlightened king, the vast mass of legends and
poetry, accumulated during centuries, was cast in a narrative form
and formed the Epic of the Great Bharata nation, and therefore called
the _Maha-bharata_. The real facts of the war had been obliterated by
age, legendary heroes had become the principal actors, and, as is
invariably the case in India, the thread of a high moral purpose, of
the triumph of virtue and the subjugation of vice, was woven into the
fabric of the great Epic.

We should have been thankful if this Epic, as it was thus originally
put together some centuries before the Christian era, had been
preserved to us. But this was not to be. The Epic became so popular
that it went on growing with the growth of centuries. Every
generation of poets had something to add; every distant nation in
Northern India was anxious to interpolate some account of its deeds
in the old record of the international war; every preacher of a new
creed desired to have in the old Epic some sanction for the new
truths he inculcated. Passages from legal and moral codes were
incorporated in the work which appealed to the nation much more
effectively than dry codes; and rules about the different castes and
about the different stages of the human life were included for the
same purpose. All the floating mass of tales, traditions, legends,
and myths, for which ancient India was famous, found a shelter under
the expanding wings of this wonderful Epic; and as Krishna-worship
became the prevailing religion of India after the decay of Buddhism,
the old Epic caught the complexion of the times, and Krishna-cult is
its dominating religious idea in its present shape. It is thus that
the work went on growing for a thousand years after it was first
compiled and put together in the form of an Epic; until the crystal
rill of the Epic itself was all but lost in an unending morass of
religious and didactic episodes, legends, tales, and traditions.

When the mischief had been done, and the Epic had nearly assumed its
present proportions, a few centuries after Christ according to the