The goddess therefore begs Kusha to return with his court to the old capital, and when he assents, she smiles and vanishes.  The next morning Kusha announces the vision of the night, and immediately sets out for Ayodhya with his whole army.  Arrived there, King Kusha quickly restores the city to its former splendour.  Then when the hot summer comes, the king goes down to the river to bathe with the ladies of the court.  While in the water he loses a great gem which his father had given him.  The divers are unable to find it, and declare their belief that it has been stolen by the serpent Kumuda who lives in the river.  The king threatens to shoot an arrow into the river, whereupon the waters divide, and the serpent appears with the gem.  He is accompanied by a beautiful maiden, whom he introduces as his sister Kumudvati, and whom he offers in marriage to Kusha.  The offer is accepted, and the wedding celebrated with great pomp.

Seventeenth canto.  King Atithi.—­To the king and queen is born a son, who is named Atithi.  When he has grown into manhood, his father Kusha engages in a struggle with a demon, in which the king is killed in the act of killing his adversary.  He goes to heaven, followed by his faithful queen, and Atithi is anointed king.  The remainder of the canto describes King Atithi’s glorious reign.

Eighteenth canto.  The later princes.—­This canto gives a brief, impressionistic sketch of the twenty-one kings who in their order succeeded Atithi.

Nineteenth canto.  The loves of Agnivarna.—­After the twenty-one kings just mentioned, there succeeds a king named Agnivarna, who gives himself to dissipation.  He shuts himself up in the palace; even when duty requires him to appear before his subjects, he does so merely by hanging one foot out of a window.  He trains dancing-girls himself, and has so many mistresses that he cannot always call them by their right names.  It is not wonderful that this kind of life leads before long to a consuming disease; and as Agnivarna is even then unable to resist the pleasures of the senses, he dies.  His queen is pregnant, and she mounts the throne as regent in behalf of her unborn son.  With this strange scene, half tragic, half vulgar, the epic, in the form in which it has come down to us, abruptly ends.

If we now endeavour to form some critical estimate of the poem, we are met at the outset by this strangely unnatural termination.  We cannot avoid wondering whether the poem as we have it is complete.  And we shall find that there are good reasons for believing that Kalidasa did not let the glorious solar line end in the person of the voluptuous Agnivarna and his unborn child.  In the first place, there is a constant tradition which affirms that The Dynasty of Raghu originally consisted of twenty-five cantos.  A similar tradition concerning Kalidasa’s second epic has justified itself; for some time only seven cantos were known; then more were discovered, and we