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adultery in order to save life, he does only what was done by the most civilized of pagan nations, who had the same opinions upon the subject: witness the liberality of Socrates in lending his wife to a friend, and the generosity of Seleucus quoted in the following pages.

Nor is it a small merit in an author, that he has been able to say so much of novelty and of interest upon the congress of the sexes, a subject which has been worked since the remotest ages, which is supposed to have been exhausted long ago, and yet which no one has treated as it is treated in this treatise. The originality is everywhere mixed up, it is true, with a peculiar quaintness, resulting from the language and from the peculiarities of Hindu thought, yet it is not the less original. Nothing can be more characteristic of the Indian than this laboured and mechanical style of love; when kisses are divided into so many kinds; when there are rules for patting with the palm and the back of the hand, and regulations for the several expirations of breath. Regarded in this light, the book becomes an ethnological treasure, which tells us as much of Hindu human nature as the "Thousand Nights and a Night" of Arab manners and customs in the cinquecento.

The author informs us that the treatise was composed by the Arch-poet Kalyana Mall (himself), and unfortunately we know little of him. A biography of the poets, the Kavi-Charika, states that he was a native of Kalinga, by caste a Brahman, who flourished during the reign of Anangabhima, alias Ladadiva, the King of that country; and an inscription in the Sanctuary of Jagannath proves that the Rajah