Appropriately does Horace observe:—­

    “Nor was the flute at first with silver bound,
    Nor rivalled emulous the trumpet’s sound;
    Few were its notes, its forms were simply plain,
    Yet not unuseful was its feeble strain,
    To aid the chorus, and their songs to raise,
    Filling the little theatre with ease,
    To which a thin and pious audience came
    Of frugal manners, and unsullied fame.”

CHAPTER III.

The origin of the Indian Drama—­Aryan Mythology—­Clown and Columbine—­Origin of the Chinese Drama—­Inception of the Japanese Drama—­The Siamese Drama—­Dramatic performances of the South Sea Islanders, Peruvians, Aztecs, Zulus, and Fijis—­The Egyptian Drama.

Of the Indian Drama we learn that the union of music, song, dance, and Pantomime took place centuries ago B.C., at the festivals of the native gods, to which was afterwards added dialogue, and long before the advent, out of which it grew, of the native drama itself.

The progenitors of the Indo-European race, the Aryans—­in Sanscrit meaning Agriculturists—­who crossed the Indus from Amoo, where they dwelt near the Oxus, some two thousand years before Christ, were the original ancestors and people of India.

The Aryan race (Hindus and Persians only speak of themselves as Aryans) laid the foundation of the Grecian and Roman Mythology, the dark and more sombre legends of the Scandinavian and the Teuton; and all derived from the various names grouped round the Sun god, which in the lighter themes the Aryans associated with the rising and the setting of the sun, in all its heavenly glory, and with the sombre legends the coming of the winter, and marking the difference between lightness and darkness.

In India the origin of dramatic entertainments has been attributed to the sage Bharata (meaning an actor), who received, it is said, a communication from the god Brahma to introduce them, as the latter had received his knowledge of them from the Vedas.  Bharata was also said to be the “Father of dramatic criticism.”  Pantomimic scenes derived from the heathen Mythology of Vishnu—­a collection of poems and hymns on the Aryan religion—­are even now in India occasionally enacted by the Jatras of the Bengalis and the Rasas of the provinces in the west, and, just as their forefathers did ages and ages ago.  An episode from the history of the god Vishnu, in relation to his marriage with Laxmi, was a favourite subject for the early Indian Drama.  Of Vedic Mythology Professor Max Mueller observes that in it “There are no genealogies, no settled marriages between gods and goddesses.  The father is sometimes the son, the brother, the husband, and she who in one hymn is the mother, is in another the wife.  As the conceptions of the poet vary so varies the nature of these gods.”

The Hindoo dramatic writer, Babhavnti—­the Indian Shakespeare—­introduced with success in one of his dramas, like in our “Hamlet,” “a play within a play,” and much in a similar way as our early dramatists used in their plays, the “dumb shows.”