confines description to the scenic notices at the commencement of each scene—notices which an Indian dramatist would certainly have worked out as poetry in the body of the play, expending, too, his highest art on these very parts which the Western dramatist cannot allow into his drama at all. If we are asked the causes of this marked difference between the dramas of the East and those of the West, we shall be content to name the absence of individuality in the former contrasted with the latter—weak character-drawing being thus supplemented by natural description—and the prominence of town-life in the Western contrasted with that of the village and country in the Eastern civilisation; but to answer the question at all fully would carry us far beyond the limits of the present work.
§ 85. Closely connected with this prevalence of natural description is a vivid realisation of sights and sounds likewise common to the Indian and Chinese theatres. In the Indian play Mrichchhakatí, for example, the following graphic speech is put into the mouth of Karnapúraka. "Only hear. Your ladyship's fierce elephant 'Post-breaker' killed his keeper and broke his chain; he then scoured off along the high-road, making a terrible confusion. The people shouted and screamed, 'Carry off the children, get up the trees, climb the walls; the elephant is coming!' Away went girdles and anklets; and pearls and diamonds were scattered about in all directions. There he was, plunging about in Ujjayin, and tearing everything to pieces with his trunk, his feet, and his tusks, as if the city had been a large tank full of lotus-flowers." Again, every reader of Sakuntalá will remember the graphic description with which that play opens. After the Brahman has pronounced the usual benediction, and the actress, at the manager's
