savyādheḥ kṛçatā kṣatasya rudhiraṁ daṣṭasya lālāsrutiḥ kiṁcin naitad ihāsti tat katham asau pānthas tapasvī mṛtaḥ? ā jñātaṁ madhulampaṭair madhukarair ārabdhakolāhale nūnaṁ sāhasikena cūtamukule dṛṣṭiḥ samāropitā. ‘Had he been ill he would have been emaciated; wounded, he would have bled; bitten, have shown the venom; no sign of these is here; how then has the unhappy traveller met his death? Ah! I see. When the bees began to hum as they sought greedily for honey, the rash one let his glance fall on the mango bud’. Spring is the time for lovers’ meetings; the traveller, far from his beloved, lets himself think of her and dies of despair. The Kaviputras, a pair according to the verse cited from them in the Subhāṣitāvali [258], were apparently also collaborators, a decidedly curious parallel with Somila and Rāmila, as such collaboration seems later rare. The stanza is pretty: bhrūcāturyaṁ kuñcitāntāḥ kaṭākṣāḥ: snigdhā hāvā lajjitāntāç ca hāsāḥ līlāmandaṁ prasthitaṁ ca sthitaṁ ca: strīṇām etad bhūṣaṇam āyudhaṁ ca. ‘The play of the brows, the sidelong glances which contract the corners of the eyes, words of love, bashful laughter, the slow departure in sport, and the staying of the steps: these are the ornaments and the weapons of women.’ Strange that so scanty remnants should remain of poets who must have deserved high praise to receive Kālidāsa’s recognition, but the fame of that poet doubtless inflicted on them the fate that all but overtook Bhāsa himself. 2. THE AUTHORSHIP AND AGE OF THE MṚCCHAKAṬIKĀ The discovery of the Cārudatta of Bhāsa has cast an unexpected light on the age of the Mṛcchakaṭikā, but has still left it dubious whether or not the author is to be placed before Kālidāsa. That this rank was due to him was the general opinion before Professor Lévi attacked the theory, and it is curious that later he should have inclined to doubt the value of his earlier judgement. The existence of the Cārudatta would explain, of course, the silence of Kālidāsa on the Mṛcchakaṭikā, if it existed in his time. Explicit use of the drama by Kālidāsa or the reverse would be conclusive, but unhappily none of the parallels which can be adduced have any effective force, and from rhetorical quotations we only have the fact that Çūdraka was recognized as an author by Vāmana, [259] for Daṇḍin’s citation of a verse found in the Mṛcchakaṭikā is now clearly known to be a citation from Bhāsa, in whose works the verse in question twice occurs. With this falls the hypothesis of Pischel, [260] who, after ascribing the play to Bhāsa, later fathered it upon Daṇḍin, to make good the number of three famous works with which he is in later tradition credited.