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 but in the land to which it is sent or given. An exception is found in the worship of Shiva, which is still dominant in Benares.

If the date I have suggested as that of the final compilation of the Mahabharata be correct, it would follow that the great work must in the doing have trained a vast number of scholars and critics. It must also have called together in one place (doubtless Benares) an enormous mass of tradition, folk-lore, old records, and persons representing various kinds of ancient knowledge. All this would constitute that city an informal university of a most real and living type, and it might well be that the learning and research of which to this day it is the home was the result of the revival thus created under Vikramaditya of Ujjain.

Of the Gupta age as a whole (A.D. 326 to 500), we find Vincent Smith saying:—

"To the same age probably should be assigned the principal Puranas in their present form; the metrical legal treatises, of which the so-called Code of Manu is the most familiar example; and, in short, the mass of the *'classical' Sanskrit literature. The patronage of the great Gupta emperors gave, as Professor Bhandarkar observes, 'a general literary impulse,' which extended to every department, and gradually raised Sanskrit to the position which it long retained as the sole literary language of Northern India. . . . The golden age of the Guptas, glorious in literary, as in political, history, comprised a period of a century and a quarter