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manical in tone, stretching from the 9th to the 13th century. Its first great composition, the Kural of Tiruvalluvar, not later than the 10th century A. D. is said to have been the work of a poet sprung from the Pariah or lowest caste. The Jain period of Tamil literature includes works on ethics and language ; among them the Divakaram literally the ‘Day-making Dictionary'. The period culminated in the Chintamani, a romantic epic of 15,000 lines by an unknown Jain author ... Contemporaneous with the Jain cycle of Tamil literature the great adaptation of the Ramayana was composed by Kambar for the Dravidian races ... Between that period and the 16th century two encyclopædic collections of Tamil hymns in praise of Siva were gradually formed... During the same centuries the Vaishnavite apostles were equally prolific in Tamil religious songs... After a period of literary inactivity the Tamil genius again blossomed forth in the 16th and 17th centuries with a poet-king as the leader of the literary revival. In the 17th century arose an anti-Brahmanical Tamil literature known as the Sittar school ... The Tamil writers of the 18th and 19th centuries are classified as modern. The honours of this period are divided between a pious Sivaite and the Italian Jesuit, Beschi.' The above extracts from Dr. W. W. Hunter's Gazetteer will clearly show that he has simply followed Dr. Cadwell's classification, paraphrasing it in his usual racy style. It might be said here once for all that all other English writers on Tamil literature, including