Fortunately, in the ‘[S’]akoontala’ the story is diversified and the interest well sustained by a chain of stirring incidents.  The first link of the chain, however, does not commence until the Fourth Act, when the union of the heroine with King Dushyanta, and her acceptance of the marriage-ring as a token of recognition, are supposed to have taken place.  Then follows the King’s departure and temporary desertion of his bride; the curse pronounced on [S’]akoontala by the choleric Sage; the monarch’s consequent loss of memory; the bride’s journey to the palace of her husband; the mysterious disappearance of the marriage-token; the public repudiation of [S’]akoontala; her miraculous assumption to a celestial asylum; the unexpected discovery of the ring by a poor fisherman; the King’s agony on recovering his recollection; his aerial voyage in the car of Indra; his strange meeting with the refractory child in the groves of Kasyapa; the boy’s battle with the young lion; the search for the amulet, by which the King is proved to be his father; the return of [S’]akoontala, and the happy reunion of the lovers;—­all these form a connected series of moving and interesting incidents.  The feelings of the audience are wrought up to a pitch of great intensity; and whatever emotions of terror, grief, or pity may have been excited, are properly tranquillized by the happy termination of the story.

Indeed, if a calamitous conclusion be necessary to constitute a tragedy, the Hindu dramas are never tragedies.  They are mixed compositions, in which joy and sorrow, happiness and misery, are woven in a mingled web—­tragi-comic representations, in which good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are allowed to blend in confusion during the first Acts of the drama.  But, in the last Act, harmony is always restored, order succeeds to disorder, tranquillity to agitation; and the mind of the spectator, no longer perplexed by the apparent ascendency of evil, is soothed, and purified, and made to acquiesce in the moral lesson deducible from the plot.

The play of ‘[S’]akoontala,’ as Sir W. Jones observes, must have been very popular when it was first performed.  The Indian empire was then in its palmy days, and the vanity of the natives would be flattered by the introduction of those kings and heroes who were supposed to have laid the foundation of its greatness and magnificence, and whose were connected with all that was sacred and holy in their religion, Dushyanta, the hero of the drama, according to Indian legends, was one of the descendants of the Moon, or in other words, belonged to the Lunar dynasty of Indian princes; and, if any dependence may be placed on Hindu chronology, he must have lived in the twenty-first or twenty-second generation after the Flood.  Puru, his most celebrated ancestor, was the sixth in descent from the Moon’s son Budha, who married a daughter of the good King Satya-vrata, preserved by Vishnu in the Ark at the time of the