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their poetic celebrity has been abused, and has given rise to sects of votaries, who think that the repetition of their names is a sufficient substitute for all moral and religious merit. Most of the mendicant orders choose Ráma for their patron.
RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND OPINIONS
The worship of Krishna may be traced to the other of the two great mytho-heroic poems of the Hindus, the Mahabharata. In the accounts there given of him there is more of mysticism than in the story of Ráma; but even there he does not appear under the character in which he is most popular, that of the infant Gopála, the boy Cowherd, and the juvenile lover of Rádhá. It is in these capacities that he is now most extensively worshipped; and they are no doubt fictions of comparatively modern invention. Vishnu was born as Krishna for the destruction of Kansa, an oppressive monarch, and, in fact, an incarnate Daitya or Titan, the natural enemy of the gods. Kansa being forewarned of his fate seeks to anticipate his destroyer; but Krishna is conveyed secretly away from Mathurá, the capital of Kansa, and is brought up as the child of a cowherd at Vrindavan, a pastoral district near Mathurá. It is whilst thus circumstanced that he has been exalted into an object of adoration, and the mischievous follies of the child, the boy, and the lad, are the subject of popular delight and wonder. His male companions are not very prominent in the tale of his youth; but the females, the deified dairy-maids, play a more important part in the drama. Amongst the most conspicuous is the one I have named, Rádhá;
