Page:The Harsa-carita of Bana (1897).djvu/20

 Kailasacandra Datta Castri 1 had published the text and translation of the fifth book (Benares, 1883), with an original Sanskrit commentary of his own; this has often helped us in obscure passages and we have frequently quoted it. Pandit Ravaji Ramacandra Kale has also published (Bombay 1882) a very useful volume of English notes to the whole work; this only came into our hands when our translation was more than half printed, but we gladly acknowledge our obligations to the author as he often supplements or improves upon the printed commentary. When our translation was partly printed we obtained the help of the valuable MS. (A) which Hofrath Prof. Btihler has presented to the India Office Library, and he also lent to us a collection of the various readings of another MS. and a native scholar's notes on the first book. The MS. A has been of great assistance to us and we have frequently quoted it in the later part of our translation and in the Notes in the Appendix, but as we were not re -editing the text, we have chiefly consulted it where the native editions seemed corrupt.

We are painfully conscious of the imperfections of our translation ; but we offer it to Oriental scholars as an honest attempt to help the student in reading a difficult Sanskrit work which will well repay the trouble of mastering it. The book is full of Sanskrit lore of every kind ; but its author was not (as Gibbon says of Libanius) "a recluse student whose mind, regardless of his contemporaries, was incessantly fixed on the Trojan war and the Athenian commonwealth." He was by no means the mere lover of what was abstruse and difficult; he had also an eye for the picturesque and the pathetic, and he could sympathise with the men and women of his own time; like Apollonius Rhodius, he was a poet as well as a grammarian.

1 [He was an old pupil in the Calcutta Sanskrit College. E. B. C.]