on Hindú 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']akoontalá, was Bharata, from whom India is still called by the
natives Bhárata-varsha. After him came Samvarana, Kuru, Sántanu,
Bhíshma, and Vyasa. The latter was the father of Dhritaráshtra and
Pándu, the quarrels of whose sons form the subject of the great
Sanskrit epic poem called Mahá-bhárata, 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']akoontalá is told in the
Mahá-bhárata. The pedigree of [S']akoontalá, 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']wámitra, a name associated with many remarkable
circumstances in Hindú mythology and history. His genealogy and the
principal events of his life are narrated in the Rámáyana, the first
of the two epic poems which were to the Hindús what the Iliad and the
Odyssey were to the Greeks. He was originally of the regal caste; and,
having raised himself to the rank of a Bráhman by the length and
rigour of his penance, he became the preceptor of Rámachandra, who
was the hero of the Rámáyana, and one of the incarnations of the god
Vishnu. With such an antecedent interest in the particulars of the
story, the audience could not fail to bring a sharpened appetite, and
a self-satisfied frame of mind, to the performance of the play.

Although in the following translation it has been thought expedient to
conform to modern usage, by indicating at the head of each Act the
scene in which it is laid, yet it is proper to apprise the English