os, notwithstanding the occasional grandeur and beauty
of imagery, often verges on the ridiculous. But, by way of relief, an
element of life is generally introduced in the character of the
Vidushaka, or Jester, who is the constant companion of the hero; and in
the young maidens, who are confidential friends of the heroine, and soon
become possessed of her secret. By a curious regulation, the jester is
always a Brahman, and, therefore, of a caste superior to the king
himself; yet his business is to excite mirth by being ridiculous in
person, age, and attire. He is represented as grey-haired, hump-backed,
lame and hideously ugly. In fact, he is a species of buffoon, who is
allowed full liberty of speech, being himself a universal butt. His
attempts at wit, which are rarely very successful, and his allusions to
the pleasures of the table, of which he is a confessed votary, are
absurdly contrasted with the sententious solemnity of the despairing
hero, crossed in the prosecution of his love-suit. His clumsy
interference with the intrigues of his friend, only serves to augment
his difficulties, and occasions many an awkward dilemma. On the other
hand, the shrewdness of the heroine's confidantes never seem to fail
them under the most trying circumstances; while their sly jokes and
innuendos, their love of fun, their girlish sympathy with the progress
of the love-affair, their warm affection for their friend, heighten the
interest of the plot, and contribute not a little to vary its monotony.

Indeed, if a calamitous conclusion 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 mingle 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 ascendancy of
evil, is soothed, and purified, and made to acquiesce in the moral
lesson deducible from the plot.

In comparison with the Greek and the modern drama, Nature occupies a
much more important place in Sanskrit plays. The characters are
surrounded by Nature, with which they are in constant communion. The
mango and other trees, creepers, lotuses, and pale-red trumpet-flowers,
gazelles, fla