2023-02-21 17:40:06 by ambuda-bot
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FOREWORD
experience in private and public affairs
enshrined in proverbs, apophthegms and
rules of chivalry and statecraft, which
indicate millennia of civilisation behind.
If the reader but bring a little capacity
to reflect and learn, he will find himself
wiser and better when he closes the
volume than when he began it.
Those that have essayed literary tasks
will appreciate and enjoy a certain
feature of this enterprise. There is noth-
ing in this abridgment which is not
Valmiki's. Large portions of the original
epic have been cut out: but the articula-
tion of the portions that are retained is
effected in the poet's own words. No
vestiges are visible of the dismember-
ment, no transfusion from a foreign
organism, no prose links, no variation
from the anushtubh metre. The compiler
Pandit A. M. Srinivasa Achariar, has
necessarily been driven to strange shifts.
But I have not seen his vandalism go
lower down than quarters of slokas.
Perhaps there is not even one case of four
several quarters being lifted from four
FOREWORD
experience in private and public affairs
enshrined in proverbs, apophthegms and
rules of chivalry and statecraft, which
indicate millennia of civilisation behind.
If the reader but bring a little capacity
to reflect and learn, he will find himself
wiser and better when he closes the
volume than when he began it.
Those that have essayed literary tasks
will appreciate and enjoy a certain
feature of this enterprise. There is noth-
ing in this abridgment which is not
Valmiki's. Large portions of the original
epic have been cut out: but the articula-
tion of the portions that are retained is
effected in the poet's own words. No
vestiges are visible of the dismember-
ment, no transfusion from a foreign
organism, no prose links, no variation
from the anushtubh metre. The compiler
Pandit A. M. Srinivasa Achariar, has
necessarily been driven to strange shifts.
But I have not seen his vandalism go
lower down than quarters of slokas.
Perhaps there is not even one case of four
several quarters being lifted from four