PREFACE. Most of the works in Kannada ( Kanarese ), whether poetry or prose, are either expansions or contractions of our two great epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. Almost every work has for its theme some incident from either of these two immortal works. The object in having the same field for the choice of subjects may be to sing the praises of the ideal and popular heroes in so many different forms, for the edification equally of the learned and the unlearned. While this repetition is laudable on the one hand, it has, on the other, all the short comings of mere imitation without originality; dryness without curiosity, and a mental cramp without intellectual liberty. The question is whether such pitfalls cannot be avoided by transferring the attention from those ideal heroes and heroines to a conception of characters of our daily life, which in their nature and in their deeds, more
