ctual possession
of a MS. copy of one of these dramas, with what avidity he proceeded
to explore the treasures which for eighteen hundred years had remained
as unknown to the European world as the gold-fields of Australia.

The earliest Sanskrit drama with which we are acquainted, the
'Clay-cart,' translated by my predecessor in the Boden Chair at
Oxford, Professor H.H. Wilson, is attributed to a regal author, King
[S']udraka, the date of whose reign cannot be fixed with any certainty,
though some have assigned it to the first or second century B.C.
Considering that the nations of Europe can scarcely be said to have
possessed a dramatic literature before the fourteenth or fifteenth
century of the present era, the great age of the Hindu plays would of
itself be a most interesting and attractive circumstance, even if
their poetical merit were not of a very high order. But when to the
antiquity of these productions is added their extreme beauty and
excellence as literary compositions, and when we also take into
account their value as representations of the early condition of Hindu
society--which, notwithstanding the lapse of two thousand years, has
in many particulars obeyed the law of unchangeableness ever stamped on
the manners and customs of the East--we are led to wonder that the
study of the Indian drama has not commended itself in a greater degree
to the attention of Europeans, and especially of Englishmen. The
English student, at least, is bound by considerations of duty, as well
as curiosity, to make himself acquainted with a subject which
elucidates and explains the condition of the millions of Hindus who
owe allegiance to his own Sovereign, and are governed by English laws.

Of all the Indian dramatists, indeed of all Indian poets, the most
celebrated is Kalidasa, the writer of the present play. The late
Professor Lassen thought it probable that he flourished about the
middle of the third century after Christ. Professor Kielhorn of
Goettingen has proved that the composer of the Mandasor Inscription
(A.D. 472) knew Kalidasa's Ritusamhara. Hence it may be inferred that
Lassen was not far wrong[1]. Possibly some King named Vikramaditya
received Kalidasa at his Court, and honoured him by his patronage
about that time. Little, however, is known of the circumstances of his
life. There is certainly no satisfactory evidence to be adduced in
support of the tradition current in India that he lived in the time
of the _gre