द्वितीय राजतरङ्गिणी (जोनराज - कल्हणोत्तर मध्यकालीन कश्मीर का प्रामाणिक इतिहास)

ii
and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, it seems that the
later authors have greatly improved Kahlana's method
of writing history. They are clear and perspicuous, and
events are narrated consecutively, so that the whole
narration runs in one continuous flow. The writers
however could not forget that they were poets as well as
historians, and consequently they interspersed their ac-
counts with flowers of poesy and rhetorical flourishes !
It is to be regretted that the last of the works men-
tioned above has been very carelessly edited. Portions
of the narrative have got inserted in wrong places so as
to interrupt the flow of the narrative and to render the
meaning in those places unintelligible. The translator
has tried his best to put these intruding fragments into
their proper places. He has however not been able
to find the proper place of three unimportant and
uninteresting stories which he has put in appendices.
It must be mentioned that valuable as the writings
of these authors are from a historical point of view, in
the absence of any other history of the country they
relate to, we cannot unhasitatingly accept their esti-
mation of persons and events when we remember that
they were, what may be called, court pandits, and
depended on the smiles of kings, whose accounts they
wrote, for almost everything they had in the world.
It is not unlikely that they often had to read out their
writings in court. We almost always find that they be-
gin the account of a king by extolling his virtues to the
skies, and we may be sure that they never wrote their