AN OUTLINE
ON TELUGU CLASSICS.
To persons whose horizon of ideas has been enlarged and enlightened by it study of poetry in other languages.-whether in the original or in the translation--the Telugu Classics, consisting mainly in metrical productions, must seem deficient in many forms of emotional expression. One of such is Elegiac poetry which may be taken, if it has not been already so taken, to comprehend war, with its incidents of joy and sorrow, politics, and social relations, in all forms and phases of feeling, calculated to stir the heart in human affairs, besides love. That of this element there is a regrettable paucity, is not a scarcity, most strike every unbiassed student of Telugu Literature. In saying this, I wish to guard myself from being misunderstood as not making an exception in favour of the Telugu Maha-bharata, which presents no few striking instances, depicting almost every passion, implanted in the human breast. Of the emotions of heroism and of grief, chietly, there are, in that noble Epic, utterances which so far sway the reader that the least domonstrative of his kind cannot help feeling, as he goes over them, that his intonation has insensibly grown spirited or choked and that his eyes have begun to glisten with involuntary joy or drop unbidden tears. Nor
