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succeeded in almost displacing from Mewar the older religion of Ekalinga, and he originated, in place of that unrefined and ascetic faith, an epicurean system of beliefs in which the philosophy and poetry which had inspired Narasinha was reduced into a number of scrip- tural commandments and vows which illiterate devotees gradually accepted in their literal libidinous meanings. Henceforth the allegories of the Chaucer of Gujardt become obsolete and extinct in religion as wellas in poetry. The whole fabric of beliefs now sinks into a mixture of fetichism, idolatry and mythology so far as the unassisted masses areconcerned. The poets, though they lose all memory of the old allegories, preserve, however at times an evergreen symbolism of the Unseen Lord of the Universe in the man-made idol and fill the worshipper with an aspiration to rise from a meditation of the God-head, held to be specially existing in the idol, expand or transmigrate into love for the mythological hero and then into an abstract love for the abstract deity. This process of the poet is typical, whether he sings of Vishnu or of Siva or of the Mother Goddess. The century in which Akho was hurling his satires against this and other creeds seems to have entirely resisted and kept off the creed and power of Vallabh from Gujarati poetry, if not altogether from Gujarat. Butas soon as this century was over and the political anarchy and chaos of the next century placed the country at the mercy
