The adventures of Nala showed how that king, having been in the same manner unfortunate with the dice, had suffered still greater toil and misery, and had at length recovered his kingdom and his wife.

The popularity of this fable with the natives, is sufficiently proved by the numerous poetic versions of the story.

The Nalodaya, a poem ascribed to Kalidas, should first be mentioned.

A new edition of this work has been recently published by Ferdinand Benary; we have a notice of it in the Quarterly Review: it seems to bear the same relation to the simple and national episode of the Mahabharata, as the seicentesti of Italy to Dante or Ariosto, or Gongora to the poem of the Cid.

Another poem called Naishadha, in twenty-two books, does not complete the story, but only carries it as far as the fifteenth book.