Manu, Code of, one of the sacred books of the Hindus, in which is expounded the doctrine of Brahminism, inculcating “sound, solid, and practical morality,” and containing evidence of the progress of civilisation among the Aryans from their first establishment in the valley of the Ganges. Manu, the alleged author, appears to have been a primitive mythological personage, conceived of as the ancestor and legislator of the human race, and as having manifested himself through long ages in a series of incarnations.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Mantuan Swan * Manzoni, Alessandro