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Grecian god plays divinely on his reed, to express, we are told, ethereal harmony. He has his attendant nymphs of the tures and the dairy. His face is as radiant as the sky, and his head illumined with the horns of a crescent; whilst his lower extremities are deformed and shaggy, as a symbol of the vegetables which the earth produces, and of the beasts who roam over its surface. Now we may compare this portrait partly with the general character of Krishen, the shepherd god, and partly with the description in the Bhagavat, of the Divine Spirit exhibited in the form of this universal world."*

Vayu is the god of the winds, and rides on an Antelope, with a sabre in his right hand. One of his names, also, is Pavana. Agny, the god of fire, also named Pavaca, or the purifier, may be compared with the Vulcan of Egypt, where he was a deity of high rank; whereas the Vulcan of Greece appears to have been merely a

* Jones.

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forger of arms. Suaha, the wife of Pavaca, seems to answer to the younger Vesta, "or Vestia, as the Eolians pronounced the Greek word for a hearth."* But the consort of this Indian Vulcan, is distinct from Bhavany, the Venus and consort of Siva. The Greeks and Romans, whose system is less regular than that of the Indians, married Venus to their divine artist, whom they named also Hephaistos; and who answers more properly to the Indian Visvacarma, the armourer of the gods, and inventor of the Agny-Astra, or weapons of fire. Visvacarma is said to have made all the arms for the war maintained in the Sutty-Youg, by the Dewatas against the Assours, or the war between the good and evil spirits.

Much affinity is to be discovered between the Hindu Ayodhya, and the European Bacchus, not as the god presiding over the vintage, but in his character of hero and conqueror, as Dionysus, the son of Semele

* Jones.

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and Jupiter; whom the Greeks also named Bromios and Bugenes, or the horned, with reference to his father Jupiter Ammon,* or to the fable that he himself was born with horns. He was likewise called Triambos, or Dithyrambos, the triumphant; which may refer to his triumphant entry into Thebes, the birth-place of his mother, and where, after all his various exploits, he fixed his residence, employing himself in promoting the happiness of his people, in reforming abuses, and making salutary laws, whence he obtained the title of Thesmo

* According to fabulous history, Bacchus on his return from Asia, passing with his army through the deserts of Lybia, was in danger of perishing for want of water, when his father Jupiter appearing in the shape of a ram, conducted him to a fountain. In testimony of gratitude, he there built a temple to Jupiter, which, alluding to the desert, he named Ammon. Jupiter was there worshipped under the figure of a ram; and in some other places he was to be seen in a human shape with horns. Bacchus, also, has been represented with horns: Ariadne says, in Ovid,

" Cœperunt matrem formosi tauri; me tuu."

phorus. The name of Lyæus, or Liber, may, it is conceived, be applicable to the god of wine, one of the effects of which is to remove restraint. His head in this character is bound with ivy.* Bacchus, the hero, is represented in point of beauty even to have rivalled Apollo, and like him to have enjoyed eternal youth. "Both Greeks and Romans had writings and traditionary accounts of his giving laws to men, and of his conquests in India, with an army of satyrs. It were superfluous in a mere essay, to go any length in the parallel between this European god and Ayodhya, whom the Hindus believe to have been an appearance on earth of the preserving power; to have been a conqueror of the highest renown, and the deliverer of nations from tyrants, as well as of his consort Sita, from the giant Ravan, king of Lanca, or Ceylon; and to have commanded in

* Sir William Jones, in his dissertation, mentions Eleutherios, among the titles of Bacchus; but this was one of the titles of Jupiter,

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chief a numerous and intrepid race of those large monkeys, which our naturalists, or some of them, have denominated Indian satyrs. His general, the prince of satyrs, was named Hanumat, or with high cheekbones. Might not this army of satyrs have been merely a race of mountaineers?--However that may be, the large breed of Indian apes is, at this moment, held in high veneration by the Hindūs, and fed with devotion by the Brahmins; who seem, in two or three places on the banks of the Ganges, to have a regular endowment for the support of them. They live in tribes of three or four hundred, are wonderfully gentle, (I speak as an eye-witness) and appear to have some kind of order and subordination in their little sylvan polity."* We, however, state this supposed affinity between the two heroes merely as hypothetical, an observation which is applicable to all subjects whence we draw con

* Jones.

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