Book I

, Canto XIV.

778 In the Bengal recension the fourth Book ends here, the remaining Cantos being placed in the fifth.

779 Each chief comes forward and says how far he can leap. Gaja says he can leap ten yojans. Gavaksha can leap twenty. Gavaya thirty, and so on up to ninety.

780 Prahláda, the son of Hiraṇyakaśipu, was a pious Datya remarkable for his devotion to Vishṇu, and was on this account persecuted by his father.

781 The Bengal recension calls him Aríshṭanemi’s brother. “The commentator says ‘Aríshṭanemi is Aruṇa.’ Aruṇa the charioteer of the sun is the son of Kaśyapa and Vinatá and by consequence brother of Garuḍa, called Vainateya from Vinatá, his mother.” GORRESSIO.

782 A nymph of Paradise.

783 Hanu or Hanú means jaw. Hanumán or Hanúmán means properly one with a large jaw.

784 Vishṇu, the God of the Three Steps.

785 Náráyaṇ, “He who moved upon the waters,” is Vishnu. The allusion is to the famous three steps of that God.

786 The Milky Way.

787 This Book is called Sundar or the Beatiful. To a European taste it is the most intolerably tedious of the whole poem, abounding in repetition, overloaded description, and long and useless speeches which impede the action of the poem. Manifest interpolations of whole Cantos also occur. I have omitted none of the action of the Book, but have occasionally omitted long passages of common-place description, lamentation, and long stories which have been again and again repeated.

788 Brahmá the Self-Existent.

789 Maináka was the son of Himálaya and Mená or Menaká.

790 Thus Milton makes the hills of heaven self-moving at command:

“At his command the uprooted hills retired Each to his place, they heard his voice and went Obsequious”

791 The spirit of the mountain is separable from the mountain. Himalaya has also been represented as standing in human form on one of his own peaks.

792 Ságar or the Sea is said to have derived its name from Sagar. The story is fully told in