mere fables, such as I had read about his Guru in several Indian periodicals, and I believe he fully understood what I meant. Yet we can hardly fail to see the first beginnings of the ravages which the Dialogic Process works even in the first generation. Given his own veneration for his departed master, there is a natural unwillingness, nay, an incapability, to believe or to repeat anything that might place his master in an unfavourable light. Besides, his master was dead when these records were written, and the de mortuis nihil nisi bonum is deeply engraved in every human heart. What is believed and told by everybody in a small village, chiefly by his friends and admirers, is not likely to be contradicted; and if once a man is looked upon as different from others, as possessed of superhuman and miraculous powers, everybody has something new to add in confirmation of what everybody is ready to believe, while a doubt or a denial is treated as a sign of unkindness, possibly of envy or malice. The story, for instance, of the Biihman lady who was sent as a messenger and teacher to Ramaknshwa, will sound to us far from probable. But when I first heard of it, this lady was represented as a kind of goddess who met her pupil in a forest and instructed him, like another Sarasvatt, in all the Vedas, Pur&ras, and philosophies. The difficulty that had to be solved by this heavenly apparition was, no doubt, the fact that Rmaksha had never received a proper classical education, and yet spoke with authority about the ancient literature and religion of his countrymen. The fact that he was ignorant of Sanskrit, nay, that he did not know a single word of the sacred language of India, is
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THE LIFE AND SAYINGS OF RÂMAKRISHNA.
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