Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/274

250 the second, niti, on the government of the world; and the third, vairâgja, the suppression of human passions. It is probable that the writer of a justly celebrated drama named Mrikkhakatika, whose name has been merged in that of King Shûdraka, King of Bidisha (now Bhilsa), his patron to whose pen he modestly ascribed his work, lived also not long after this time.

The length of Vikramâditja's reign is as difficult to fix as any other circumstance of his history, and it is not clear whether the æra which dates from him was originally reckoned from the commencement or the end of his reign; we have already seen the duration which fable ascribes to it; to this may be added the further fabled promise which, it is told, the great gods Vishnu and Shiva made concerning him, that he should come back to earth in the latter times to deliver his people from the oppression of the Mussulman invaders, just as the Mongols expect Ghengis Khan and Timour, and just as in Europe similar promises of a future return as a deliverer linger round the memories of King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Frederick Barbarossa.

The legend of the Wisdom of Vikramâditja being so mysteriously connected with his throne, that whosoever sat on it was endowed with some measure of his excellences; and that the figures with which it was adorned guarded it from the approach of the unworthy, is brought forward in the story of more than one Indian sovereign. Travelling in the wake of Buddhist