plot, and the two hang together somewhat loosely. The serious plot relates to the King and his Queen, whom he had put away years before, when she was great with child, and whom many supposed to have been murdered and all believed to be dead. He is now strongly urged to a second marriage in the interests of his kingdom, but his heart yearns for his lost Queen, whom he at length discovers in a beggar woman, with their son, now a fine young man, disguised as a hermit. The hermit loves the fair one destined for the king’s second wife, and ends by marrying her.
This serious plot is poor enough, but the other story is worked out in an irresistibly comic manner. The character of Jaladhur, too, though doubtless taken in great part from Shakespeare’s Falstaff is life-like and consistent, and Mallika, with her love of mischief and fun and inexhaustible fertility of resource, is Babu Dinabandhu Mitra’s best female character. Jaladhur’s ugly and jealous wife, too, is excellently drawn, and tickles the reader’s fancy with her firm persuasion that her corpulent old husband is sighed after and inveigled by all the young women about the place.
Lilabati is a more ambitious work. Its plot is romantic and complicated, and in working it out, the melodramatic element is largely introduced. We have not space to discuss it at length, and must, therefore, content ourselves with expressing the opinion that, as in Nabin Tapaswini Babu Dinabandhu Mitra has proved himself the greatest humourist, so in Lilabati he appears as the wittiest writer in the Bengali language. Neither Tekchánd nor Hutam come near him in this respect. Lilabati is now its author’s most widely read work, since Nil Darpan has lost its factitious popularity, but in our opinion it is rather in broad comedy and farce that its author excels than in so serious a drama.
It remains to notice Babu Dinabandhu Mitra’s two farces. In the “Old Man Mad for Marriage”, a not unfrequent kind of folly is cleverly satirized. An old man, named Rajib Mukerji, is very anxious to be married, and people are wont to irritate him by proposing as a match an ugly black-faced Dom woman, known as “Panchua’s mother”. Some school-boys determine to play him a trick. A sham Ghatak, or match-maker, is sent to him. The preliminary arrangements are completed, and Rajib is to be married. One of the most mischievous among the boys is dressed up as a girl to personate the bride, and some of the neighbours represent her male and female friends. The mock ceremony is gone through, and Rajib passes the night in jollification with the boys. His horrors may be imagined on awaking in the morning and finding that the bride by his side is “Panchua's mother”, who offers a young sucking pig to his caresses as their adopted child.
The other farce, Sadhabár Ekádasi, is more cleverly written, but unfortunately it is so disfigured by obscenity that we can
