his aërial voyage in the car of Indra; his strange meeting with the
refractory child in the groves of Kasyapa; the boy's battle with the
young lion; the search for the amulet, by which the King is proved to
be his father; the return of [S']akoontalá, and the happy reunion of the
lovers;--all these form a connected series of moving and interesting
incidents. The feelings of the audience are wrought up to a pitch of
great intensity; and whatever emotions of terror, grief, or pity may
have been excited, are properly tranquillized by the happy termination
of the story.

Indeed, if a calamitous conclusion be necessary to constitute a
tragedy, the Hindú 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']akoontalá,' 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