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of swindlers and vagabonds who perhaps filled the land in those days, the wisdom and experience of young people and old asstored up in sayings and adages and anec- -dotes,—these and many other things which are absolute novelties in the literature of the country are always bristling up throughout the poems of this man who handles his materials with an originality that wonderfully adapts itself to the local frame of mind and yet aspires to revolutionize its whole constitution. It was only natural that S&mal should not have found followers or admirers ina Brahmanised world; and the communities the had addressed were too illiterate to continue his work. But itis noteworthy that village anecdotes and bardic narrations throughout the rural populations of Northern Gujarat still revelin quoting from, and in imitating, their beloved “Sémal Bhat.” And itis also noteworthy that the poets of the generation that is now closing and making room for youngsters with fresh uni- versity blood, mostly adopted not only the metres but the popular style of Samal’s verses, though it must be said that none of these people were ever able to enter even skin-deep into the spirit of his poems.
Akho, Premdnand, and Simal are thus the three Jeading stars of Gujarati poetry in. the seventeenth century, and, as will appear from the history of subse- quent centuries, they are the only poets who, throughout the whole history of Gujarati literature, wrote pure and
