176 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
to some of us, considering its scope and subject, to be curiously unspiritual. Yet is it the veritable handing on to a new generation of scholars of the torch of the spirit.
Nothing surely in all the story here told of early India is more inspiring than that of the Guptas of Magadha and the empire which they, from their ancient seat of Pataliputra, established over the whole of India, The central fact about this great Gupta Empire, as it will seem to Indian readers, is the identification of Vikramaditya, who is now seen to have been "of Ujjain" merely in the familiar modern sense of the title added to the name of the conqueror. Vikramaditya of Ujjain, then, was no other than Chandragupta II of Pataliputra, who reigned from A.D. 375 to A.D. 413.
If this was so, we might take the year A.D. 400 as a sort of water-parting in the history of the development of modern India. The desire becomes irresistible to know how far the Puranic Age was then developed and established; to what extent and under what form Buddhism was still remembered; what was the political outlook of a Hindu of the period; and, among the most important of the questions to be answered, what were the great cities that made up the Indian idea of India, and what the associations of each? The answer to the last of these queries, if discoverable at all, would be of vastly greater significance than all the facts as to sovereigns and kingdoms about
