Page:Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit, being the Hitopadesa.djvu/14

 io TRANSLATORS PREFACE.

since my return from India, at a meeting of the Society for inquiring into the History, civil and natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia, expresses his sentiments upon this subject in the following words:—

"Their (the Hindoos) Niti-Sastra, or System of Ethics, is yet preserved, and the fables of VishnuSerma, whom we ridiculously call Pilpay, are the most beautiful, if not the most ancient, collection of Apologues in the world. They were first translated from the Sanskrit in the sixth century, by Buzerchumihr, or "bright as the sun," the chief physician, and afterwards the Vizier of the great Anushirwan, and are extant under various names in more than twenty languages, but their original title is Hitopadesa, or amicable instruction;" and as the very existence of Æsop, whom the Arabs believe to have been an Abyssinian, appears rather doubtful, I am not disin clined to suppose that the first moral fables which appeared in Europe were of Indian or Ethiopian origin."

Granting the Hitopadesa be the work it is supposed to be, to save the learned reader the trouble of re ferring to other books to trace its history, I have here brought all I have collected upon the subject under one view.

Tne learned Eraser, in his catalogue of Oriental manuscripts, under the article Ayar Danish, speaks