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Imperial Majesty with the Queen-Empress came amongst his people and moved among them, with perfect trust in them and hope for their future, the watch-word sympathy stood symbolised as an object lesson to all.
This, in short, appears to me as the dominant idea of the poem. It finds condensed expression in the beautiful verse at the end immediately before the benediction, where we are reminded that the Royal Visit gave a body and form to the abstract conception of loyalty and effaced from the minds of the people that their Emperor was a foreigner.
I need not say much on another feature of the poem. We live in days when the theory of evolution has caught hold of our minds and it is instructive to read in these verses once more the lesson of old that the past does not altogether die but lives in the present and that we are more or less creatures of ancient tradition. The Corona- tion ceremony in the West borrows a good deal from the Coronations of the Ancient East; and the description of the Coronation ceremonies of Indra, Rama, and Udhisthira in our Puranas form a valuable prelude to Mr. Agashe's in- spiring verse on the Coronation of His Imperial Majesty King George V. This is a gem of a poem, and it ought to find a high place in the Vernacular Literature on the Royal Visit. To the young in particular of the now and the future it ought to be inspiring reading.
N. G. CHANDAVARKAR.
