ned. A great people, who,
through their empire in India, command the destinies of the Eastern
world, ought surely to be conversant with the most popular of Indian
dramas, in which the customs of the Hindus, their opinions,
prejudices, and fables, their religious rites, daily occupations and
amusements, are reflected as in a mirror. Nor is the prose translation
of Sir W. Jones (excellent though it be) adapted to meet the
requirements of modern times. That translation was unfortunately made
from corrupt manuscripts (the best that could then be procured), in
which the bold phraseology of Kalidasa has been occasionally weakened,
his delicate expressions of refined love clothed in an unbecoming
dress, and his ideas, grand in their simplicity, diluted by repetition
or amplification. It is, moreover, altogether unfurnished with
explanatory annotations. The present translation, on the contrary,
while representing the purest version of the drama, has abundant
notes, sufficient to answer the exigencies of the non-oriental
scholar.

It may be remarked that in every Sanskrit play the women and inferior
characters speak a kind of provincial dialect or _patois_, called
Prakrit--bearing the relation to Sanskrit that Italian bears to Latin,
or that the spoken Latin of the age of Cicero bore to the highly
polished Latin in which he delivered his Orations. Even the heroine of
the drama is made to speak in the vernacular dialect. The hero, on the
other hand, and all the higher male characters, speak in Sanskrit; and
as if to invest them with greater dignity, half of what they say is in
verse. Indeed the prose part of their speeches is often very
commonplace, being only introductory to the lofty sentiment of the
poetry that follows. Thus, if the whole composition be compared to a
web, the prose will correspond to the warp, or that part which is
extended lengthwise in the loom, while the metrical portion will
answer to the cross-threads which constitute the woof.

The original verses are written in a great variety of Sanskrit metres.
For example, the first thirty-four verses of '[S']akoontala' exhibit
eleven different varieties of metre. No English metrical system could
give any idea of the almost infinite resources of Sanskrit in this
respect. Nor have I attempted it. Blank verse has been employed by me
in my translation, as more in unison with the character of our own
dramatic writings, and rhyming stanzas have only been admitted when