Chandragupta I., the founder of the great dynasty which Hindus extol above all others, was only a petty chieftain by birth, but he was fortunate enough to wed a lady of high lineage, who could trace a connection with the ancient Maurya house of Magadha, and, thanks to this alliance and to his own prowess, he was able at his death to bequeath real kingship to his son, Samadragupta, who, during a fifty years' reign, A.D. 326-375, again welded almost the whole of India north of the Nerbudda river into one empire, and once even spoiled Southern India right down to Cape Comorin. His victories are recorded--with an irony perhaps not wholly accidental--beneath the Asokan inscription on the Allahabad pillar. Of his zeal for Hinduism we have a convincing proof in gold coins of his reign that preserve on the obverse in the figure of the sacrificial horse a record of the _Asvamedha_, which he again revived. Strange to say, however, his fame has never been so popular as that of his son, Chandragupta II., Vikramadytia, the Sun of Power, who reigned in turn for nearly forty years, and has lived in Hindu legend as the Raja Bikram, to whom India owes her golden age. It was his court at Ujjain which is believed to have been adorned by the "Nine Gems" of Sanskrit literature, amongst whom the favourite is Kalidasa, the poet and dramatist. Amidst much that is speculative, one thing is certain. The age of Vikramadytia was an age of Brahmanical ascendancy. As has so often happened, and is still happening in India to-day in the struggle between Urdu and Hindi, the battle of religious and political supremacy was largely one of languages. During the centuries of Brahmanical depression that preceded the Gupta dynasty, the more vulgar tongue spoken of the people prevailed. Under the Guptas, Sanskrit, which was the language of the Brahmans, resumed its pre-eminence and took possession of the whole field of literature and art and science as well as of theology. Oral traditions were reduced to writing and poetry was adapted to both sacred and profane uses in the Puranas, in the metrical code of Manu, in treatises on sacrificial ritual, in Kalidasa's plays, and in many other works of which only fragments have survived. Astronomy, logic, philosophy were all cultivated with equal fervour and to the greater glory of Brahmanism. Local tradition is doubtless quite wrong in assigning to Raja Bikram the noble gateway which is the only monument of Hindu architecture at its best that Ujjain has to show to-day. But to that period may, perhaps, be traced the graceful, if highly ornate, style of architecture, of which the Bhuvaneshwar temples, several centuries more recent, are the earliest examples that can be at all accurately dated. To the credit of Brahmanism be it said that in its hour of triumph it remained at least negatively tolerant, as all purely Indian creeds generally have been. Fa-Hien, who visited India during the reign of Vikramadytia, though dismayed at the desolation which had already overtaken many of the sacred places of Buddhism, pays a generous tribute to the tolerance and statesmanship of that great sovereign. The country seems, indeed, to have enjoyed real prosperity under a paternal and almost model administration.