It is agreed among all the Pandits, that RA'MA, their Seventh incarnate Divinity, appeared as king of Ayodhyà in the interval between the filver and the brazen ages; and if we suppose him to have begun his reign at the very beginning of that interval, ftill three thousand three hundred years of the Gods, or a million one hundred and eightyeight thousand lunar years of mortals will remain in the filver age, during which the fifty-five princes between VAIVASWATA and RAMA must have governed the world; but, reckoning thirty years for a generation, which is rather too much for a long fucceffion of eldejt fons, as they are faid to have been, we cannot, by the course of nature, extend the Second age of the Hindus beyond fixteen bundred and fifty folar years: if we suppose them not to have been eldest fons, and even to have lived longer than modern princes in a diffolute age, we shall find only a period of two thousand years; and, if we remove the difficulty by admitting miracles, we must cease to reason, and may as well believe at once whatever the Bráhmans chufe to tell us.

In the Lunar pedigree we meet with another abfurdity equally fatal to the credit of the Hindu fyftem: as far as the twenty-fecond degree of descent from VAIVASWATA, the fyn

chronism of the two families appears tolerably regular, except that the Children of the Moon were not all eldeft fons; for king YAYA'TI appointed the youngest of his five fons to fucceed him in India, and allotted inferior kingdoms to the other four, who had offended him; part of the Dachin or the South, to YADU, the ancestor of CRISHNA; the north, to ANU; the east to DRUHYA; and the west, to TURVASU, from whom the Pandits believe, or pretend to believe, in compliment to our nation, that we are defcended. But of the subsequent degrees in the lunar line they know fo little, that, unable to supply a confiderable interval between BHARAT and VITAT'HA, whom they call his fon and fucceffor, they are under a neceffity of afferting, that the great ancestor of YUDHISHTHIR actually reigned feven and twenty thousand years; a fable of the same class with that of his wonderful birth, which is the subject of a beautiful Indian Drama: now, if we fuppofe his life to have lafted no longer than that of other mortals, and admit VITAT'HA and the reft to have been his regular fucceffors, we fhall fall into another absurdity; for then, if the generations in both lines were nearly equal, as they would naturally have been, we fhall find YUDHISHT'HIR, who reigned confeffedly at the close

is

of the brazen age, nine generations older than RAMA, before whofe birth the filver age allowed to have ended. After the name of BHARAT, therefore, I have fet an afterifk to denote a confiderable chaẩm in the Indian Hiftory, and have inferted between brackets, as out of their places, his twenty-four fucceffors, who reigned, if at all, in the following age immediately before the war of the Mabábbárat, The fourth Avatar, which is placed in the interval between the first and second ages, and the fifth which foon followed it, appear to be moral fables grounded on historical facts: the fourth was the punishment of an impious monarch by the Deity himself bursting from a marble Column in the shape of a lion; and the fifth was the humiliation of an arrogant Prince by fo contemptible an agent as a mendicant dwarf. After these, and immediately before BUDDHA, come three great warriours all named RA'MA; but it may justly be made a question, whether they are not three representations of one perfon, or three different ways of relating the fame History: the first and fecond RA'MAS are faid to have been contemporary ; but whether all or any of them mean RAMA, the fon of Cu'sн, I leave others to determine. The mother of the fecond RAMA was named

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CAU'SHALYA', which is a derivative of CUSHALA, and, though his father be distinguished by the title or epithet of DA'SARAT'HA, fignifying, that his War-chariot bore him to all quarters of the world, yet the name of CUSH, as the Cashmirians pronounce it, is preferved entire in that of his fon and fucceffor, and fhadowed in that of his ancestor VicUCSHI; nor can a juft objection be made to this opinion from the nafal Arabian vowel in the word Ramah mentioned by MOSES, fince the very word Arab begins with the fame letter, which the Greeks and Indians could not pronounce; and they were obliged, therefore, to express it by the vowel, which moft refembled it. On this question, however, I affert nothing nor on another, which might be proposed: "whether the fourth and fifth Avatars be

not allegorical ftories of the two prefump"tuous monarchs, NIMROD and BELUS." The hypothefis, that government was first established, laws enacted, and agriculture encouraged in India by RAMA about three thoufand eight hundred years ago, agrees with the received account of NOAH's death, and the previous fettlement of his immediate

defcendents.