PREFACE
WHEN commencing the study of a language, we are naturally led to enquire for works popular among the natives themselves, but composed in a style easy enough to be comprehended without difficulty by a foreigner. Such an enquiry in the year 1824 regarding Telugu made me acquainted with the verses collected in the present volume. Several manuscripts of VEMA, or VEMANA, (for both names are used) were put into my hands, which I perused and translated in such hours of leisure as my public employments allowed. They proved to be full of errors of every kind, in orthography, metre, and meaning ; no two copies followed the same arrangement, and they varied in extent from two to eight hundred epigrams. After collecting such copies as were to be found at Masulipatam where I was then stationed, I gradually procured others from Vizagapatam, Nellore, Guntoor, Cuddapah, and Madras. I then caused an index to be drawn up, wherein nine columns exhibited the places at which the verses appeared in as many manuscripts, which I thus was enabled to collate. The number of stanzas I found amounted to about 2,500 ; a comparison, however, showed that the total was little more than 2000.
It next became necessary to reduce the verses to some regular arrangement. Each transcriber had evidently selected such as he preferred, and no order was any where preserved. I at length formed the whole into five tolerably consistent divisions; religious, moral, satirical, mystic,
