A Draught of the Blue – An Essence of the Dusk

71

An emperor. Hindoo idols are dressed and undressed, like dolls, by their officiating priests.

72

She means, he was her Creator.

73

The Hindoos have no word, because they have not the idea, of an idol. They call it a god or an image. Our word idol implies the antagonism to paganism involved in Christianity, and no two books are more alike than S. Augustine's City of God and Ward's Hindoo Mythology.

74

Though, in Europe, this insidious appeal might lack force, it is otherwise in India: whose millions doubt their former birth no more than they doubt their own existence. It is not long since a woman in Cutch burned herself with her own dead son, because, she averred, he had been her husband in her former birth.

75

The physician of the gods, the Hindoo Æsculapius.

76

The Samwáhanam is one of those old Hindoo medical resources which we have only recently been wise enough to copy.

77

Wishámritam: lit. poison-nectar.

78

Also means without affection.

79

In all Oriental stories, statements are proved not by Aristotelian syllogism, but by "instances": and we are reminded of the opinion of the artful Retz, that "one never persuades anybody, but anybody can insinuate anything."

80

Benáres. The lady in question was one of those Hindoo Aspasias of whom many similar stories are told.

81

Which we might translate Aromatic: it includes the ideas of red colour and pungent perfume.

82

Or, as we say, castle in the air.

83

A regular trade in medieval India.

84

Everything in this story is exactly in harmony with the manners of medieval India. The Thags often preserved a woman for her beauty, when they murdered every one else.

85

The reader should remember that in Sanskrit, love and recollection are the same word.

86

The Sanskrit dwipa has exactly the same connotation as our islands of the Blest, and like them it is placed in the setting sun.