thoroughly Hindu repertory. It is the rude beginning of that
fictitious history which ripened to the Arabian Nights'
Entertainments, and which, fostered by the genius of Boccaccio,
produced the romance of the chivalrous days, and its last
development, the novel - that prose-epic of modern Europe.

Composed in Sanskrit, "the language of the gods," alias the Latin
of India, it has been translated into all the Prakrit or vernacular and
modern dialects of the great peninsula. The reason why it has not
found favour with the Moslems is doubtless the highly polytheistic
spirit which pervades it; moreover, the Faithful had already a
specimen of that style of composition. This was the Hitopadesa, or
Advice of a Friend, which, as a line in its introduction informs us,
was borrowed from an older book, the Panchatantra, or Five
Chapters. It is a collection of apologues recited by a learned
Brahman, Vishnu Sharma by name, for the edification of his
pupils, the sons of an Indian Raja. They have been adapted to or
translated into a number of languages, notably into Pehlvi and
Persian, Syriac and Turkish, Greek and Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.
And as the Fables of Pilpay,[FN#6] are generally known, by name
at least, to European litterateurs. . Voltaire remarks,[FN#7]
"Quand on fait reflexion que presque toute la terre a ete infatuee de
pareils comes, et qu'ils ont fait l'education du genre humain, on
trouve les fables de Pilpay, Lokman, d'Esope bien raisonnables."
These tales, detached, but strung together by artificial means -
pearls with a thread drawn through them - are manifest precursors
of the Decamerone, or Ten Days. A modern Italian critic describes
the now classical fiction as a collection of one hundred of those
novels which Boccaccio is believed to have read out at the court of
Queen Joanna of Naples, and which later in life were by him