nclusion 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 Deluge. The son of Dushyanta, by
[S']akoontala, was Bharata, from whom India is still called by the
natives Bharata-varsha. After him came Samvarana, Kuru, Santanu,
Bhishma, and Vyasa. The latter was the father of Dhritarashtra and
Pandu, the quarrels of whose sons form the subject of the great
Sanskrit epic poem called Maha-bharata, a poem with parts of which the
audience would be familiar, and in which they would feel the greatest
pride. Indeed the whole story of [S']akoontala is told in the
Maha-bharata. The pedigree of [S']akoontala, the heroine of the drama,
was no less interesting, and calculated to awaken the religious
sympathies of Indian spectators. She was the daughter of the
celebrated Vi[s']wamitra, a name associated with many remarkable
circumstances in Hindu mythology and history. His genealogy and the
principal events of his life are narrated in the Ramayana, the first
of the two ep