fashion and with marvellous human simplicity of the life lived by king and people when Ceylon was a kingdom and the royal cities werè centres of civilisation and learning, though as yet our national ancestry had not been evolved, and English," "Scottish," and "Irish," much more "American" or "British" (in its modern connotation), were unknown.

The second part of the record is correctly called the Suluwansa, or history of the inferior dynasty (see p. 24), but generally speaking the whole is now referred to under one title.

The first part of these records was made available for English readers by George Turnour, who translated the first thirty chapters, the work of Mahanama, in 1837.

Turnour was in the Ceylon Civil Service, and in 1827 there came into his hands a transcript of a commentary, which enabled him to translate the Pali text of the original Mahawansa. This commentary was also written by Mahanama. Buddhist writers were in the habit of making some such running commentary, as the Pali scripts had to conform to certain rules of metre which did not lend themselves to clearness of sense, so it was a usual custom to write out a liberal translation in this form, otherwise they were often unintelligible. The task was completed many years later by the publication in 1889 of the translation of the remaining chapters by L. C. Wijesinha, Mudaliyar, which carried the history up to the English occupation. There have since been other versions, but in this work references and quotations are from these two books.

The Mahawansa is not the only ancient record of the Cingalese, but it is far the most reliable and continuous, also the most accessible to English readers. Allowing for the legends and supernatural additions which have sprung up around religious events, and discounting the repetitions "with a difference" in the manner of the old nursery fairy-tale, the book, as history, is exceedingly interesting to-day.

Among the hundreds of visitors who yearly go to Ceylon, and the thousands who stop a day in port on their way to "somewhere or other by one of the great liners, it is safe to say that, while all know of Kandy and the hill-resort of Nuwara Eliya, there are comparatively few who have heard anything at all about the far greater attractions of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, and Sigiriya, the three most famous of the royal cities of old Ceylon.

Only yesterday a man, whose bent inclined him to interest in old things, said casually in my hearing, "I shan't stop in Ceylon, nothing to see there," and was amazed to learn what there was to see.

It is worth while going out East to visit the Ceylon ruins alone, and specially to see the exquisitely carved moonstones; these have nothing to do with the jewels usually associated with the island, but are semi-circular granite stones of a kind peculiarly associated with Ceylon. A few examples of semi-circular stones in a comparatively plain style have been found in South India outside temple entrances, but they have little in common with the richly carved specimens in

Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. The carving on the stones in these cities is as fresh as the day it was done, and is alive with the spirit of the artist whose hand fashioned the lifelike elephants and bullocks, the strange horses, and still stranger lions, which run incessantly after one another in a race beginning some 2,000 years ago and stretching to infinity.

Egypt has attracted its tens of thousands, and of the books that have been written about it there is no end, but mysterious and awe-inspiring as are the mighty monuments and temples of Egypt, they lack the individuality, the varying touches, the humanness of these works of Ceylon, where one is perpetually reminded by a thousand inimitable touches that all is handicraft and not machine-made.

The Cingalese have a tradition of a great king who was the son of a lion, the word Sinha in their language, hence their national name is more correctly spelt Sinhalese, but the anglicised form, being more familiar to English-speaking readers, is adopted in this book. This "Sinha" had a grandson, Wijaya,' from whom the real roll of the kings of Lanka—the ancient name for the island --begins.

Wijaya came over from India on a raiding expedition and established himself in the island some five and a half centuries before Christ (543 B.C.). The original inhabitants of the island found by him on his advent are somewhat con

1 Spelt also variously Wejaya or Vijaya.

temptuously spoken of in the records as "Yakkho" or " Yakkha "-demons.

Mr. Still in his admirable little book' says, "It is a pity the Yakkhos are silent. They never produced a book, an inscription, a coin, or a permanent building."

The crowds of followers who came over with Wijaya must have intermarried with these aborigines, for they soon ceased to have an independent existence, and reference to them stops. It may be that the few Veddahs who live in the deepest jungles to the present day are a remnant of them.

The next outstanding name among Cingalese kings is that of Tissa, or Dewanampiatissa, the "Beloved of the Gods" as he came to be called. He reigned forty years from 307 B.C., and it was in his reign that the most important event in the whole of Cingalese history happened, for Mahinda, the pious son of the great King Asoka of Indiathe monarch to whom all Indian Buddhists look as their greatest ruler-came over on a mission to convert the Cingalese.

In this he was eminently successful, not only was the king converted, but his followers embraced the new religion wholesale, as the Kentish men embraced Christianity after the example of King Ethelbert, and ever since Ceylon has been a Buddhist stronghold.

Buddhists cherish legends of the appearance of no less than twenty-four Buddhas before that of the present era, who is generally meant when the title is used. He, the only historical example,

1 Guide to the Ancient Capitals of Ceylon. (Cave & Co., Ceylon,

is, they say, the fourth of this kalpa, or section of time, in which there is still one to appear.

For a considerable time doubt was thrown by the non-Buddhist world on the actual existence of Gautama, the latest Buddha, as the date of his birth was doubtful. Even when this was admitted, he was, for many years, supposed to be of an age considerably further back in time than has since been conjectured. Professor Rhys Davids, in his article on the subject in the Encyclopædia Britannica, says:

"The date [of Buddha's death] derived from Ceylon, which is usually assigned to that event, is 543 B.C. But those scholars who have devoted most attention to the point hold this calculation to contain a certain error of about sixty years, and a probable error of about eighty to a hundred more, so that the date for the death of Buddha would have to be brought forward to 400 B.C. or a few years later."

As it is known that Buddha lived to eightyone years of age, this puts his birth somewhere about 480 B.C. Yet this is not final. The researches of Sir M. Aurel Stein and others are yearly bringing out fresh evidence on which to form an opinion. By independent calculations also, based on the evidence of inscriptions, Don M. de Z. Wickremasinghe makes the death of Buddha 483 B.C., therefore his birth 564 B.C. But there is not yet finality on this question. Gautama was born in what is now known as the borders of Nepal, at Kapilavastu. His people

1 Epigraphia Zeylanica, vol. i. p. 156.