Chronology, too, shares the same fate with the sister science of history, for in the early period it is fabulous, and in the more modern, it is often not sufficiently precise and accurate. The number of years assigned to the first three epochs of the world must be considered as possessing an astronomical import, rather than as furnishing any criterion for an historical use. It is only the fourth and last period of the world--the age of progressive misery and all-prevailing woe, which the Indians term Caliyug, that we can in any way consider an historical epoch; and this, the duration of which is computed at four thousand years, began about a thousand years before the Christian era. Of the progress and term of this period of the world, considered in reference to the history of mankind, the Indians entertain a very simple notion. They believe that the condition of mankind will become at first much worse, but will be afterwards ameliorated. The regular historical epoch when the chronology of India begins to acquire greater certainty, and from which indeed it is ordinarily computed, is the age of King Vikramaditya, who reigned in the more civilized part of India, somewhat earlier than the Emperor Augustus in the West, perhaps about sixty years before our era. It was at the court of this monarch that flourished nine of the most celebrated sages and poets of the second era of Indian literature; and among these was Calidas, the author of the beautiful dramatic poem of Sacontala, so generally known by the English and German translations. It was in the age of Vikramaditya, that the later poetry and literature of India, of which Calidas was so bright an ornament, reached its full bloom. The elder Indian poetry, particularly the two great epic poems above-mentioned, entirely belong to the early and more fabulous ages of the world; so far at least as the poets themselves are assigned to those ages, and figure in some degree, as fabulous personages. We may, however, observe that in the style of poetry, in art, and even in the language itself, there reigns a very great difference between these primitive heroic poems, and the works of Calidas and other contemporary poets--the difference is at least as great as that which exists between Homer and Theocritus, or the other Bucolick poets of Greece. The oldest of the two epic poems of the Indians, the Ramayana by the poet Valmiki, celebrates Rama, his love for a royal princess, the beautiful Sita, and his conquest of Lanka, or the modern Isle of Ceylon. Although in the old historical Sagas of the Indians, we find mention made of far-ruling monarchs and all-conquering heroes; still these traditions seem to shew, as in the instance first cited, that in the oldest, as in the latest, times prior to foreign conquest, India was not united in one great monarchy, but was generally parcelled out into a variety of states; and this fact serves to prove that such has ever been in general the political condition of that country. The whole body of ancient Indian traditions and mythological history is to be found in the other great epic of the Indians, the Maha-Barata, whose author, or at least compiler, was Vyasa, the founder of the Vedanta philosophy, the most esteemed, and most prevalent of all the philosophical systems of the Hindoos. This leads us to observe a second remarkable, and singularly characteristic, feature in Indian intellect and Indian literature, so widely remote from the relation between poetry and philosophy among other nations, particularly the Greeks. This is the close connection, and almost entire fusion of poetry and philosophy among this people. Many of their more ancient philosophical works were composed in metre, though they possess productions of a later period, which display the highest logical subtilty and analysis. Their great old poems, whatever may be the beauty of the language, and the captivating interest of the narrative, are generally imbued with, and pervaded by, the most profound philosophy; and among this people, even the history of Metaphysics ascends as far back as the mythic ages. This at least holds good of the authors, to whom the invention of the leading philosophical systems has been ascribed; although the subsequent commentaries belong to a much later and more historical period. Thus the Mahabarata contains as an episode a didactic poem, or philosophical dialogue between the fabulous personages and heroes of the epic, known in Europe by the name of the Bhagavatgita, and which has recently been ably edited and expounded in Germany, by Augustus William Von Schlegel, and William Von Humboldt.