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OF THE HINDUS.
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celebrated in the open air by country people with rustic sports, as drinking, singing, and dancing; and a remarkable and unaccountable part of the celebration was the use of ancient or vulgar jokes and obscene language, joci veteres obscenaque dicta canuntur. Finally, on the sixteenth of the Kalends of April, or the seventeenth March, occurred the Liberalia, or Festival of Bacchus, of whom, in this place, Ovid makes a singular remark, possibly embodying an ancient tradition, that burnt-offerings and oblations originated with Bacchus after his conquest of India and the East.
Ante tuos ortus aræ sine honore fuere,
Liber, et in gelidis herba reperta focis. Te memorant Ganga, totoque oriente subacto,
Primitias magno seposuisse Jovi.–Fasti III, 727–30. The character of these festival days in the Roman Calendar, and the period during which they took place, suggest probable analogies to the practices of the Hindus at the same season. The analogies are, it is true, very general and unprecise, but to use the words of Brand, “in joining the scattered fragments that survive the mutilation of ancient customs, we must be forgiven if all the parts are not found closely to agree. Little of the means of information have been transmitted to us, and that little can only be eked out by conjecture.” Nothing can be more meagre than the Fasti of Ovid in respect to the celebrations above adverted to, and it is obvious that some of them, at least, had become obsolete, even in his day, and that
