It is unfortunate, though as in the case of Shakespeare not surprising, that we know practically nothing of the life and age of Kālidāsa save what we can infer from his works and from the general history of Sanskrit literature. There are indeed stories [294] of his ignorance in youth, until he was given poetic power by the grace of Kālī, whence his strange style of Kālidāsa, slave of Kālī, which is not one prima facie to be expected in the case of a poet who shows throughout his work the finest flower of Brahmanical culture. But these tales are late and worthless, and equally without value is the fiction that he was a contemporary of King Bhoja of Dhārā in the first half of the eleventh century A.D. As little value, however, attaches to a tale which has been deemed of greater value, the alleged death of Kālidāsa in Ceylon when on a visit there by the hand of a courtesan, and the discovery of his murder by his friend Kumāradāsa, identified with the king of that name of the early part of the sixth century A.D. The tradition, as I showed in 1901, is very late, unsupported by the earliest evidence, and totally without value. [295] The most prevalent tradition makes Kālidāsa a contemporary of Vikramāditya, and treats him as one of the nine jewels of that monarch’s entourage. Doubtless the king meant by the tradition, which is late and of uncertain provenance, is the Vikramāditya whose name is associated with the era of 57 B.C. and who is credited with a victory over the Çakas. Whatever truth there may be in the legend, and in this regard we have nothing but conjecture, [296] there is not the slightest reason to accept so early a date for Kālidāsa, and it has now no serious supporter outside India. But, based on Fergusson’s suggestion [297] that the era of 57 B.C. was based on a real victory over Hūṇas in A.D. 544, the reckoning being antedated 600 years, Max Müller [298] adopted the view that Kālidāsa flourished about that period, a suggestion which was supported by the fact that Varāhamihira, also a jewel, certainly belongs to that century, and others of the jewels might without great difficulty be assigned to the same period. The theory in so far as it rested on Fergusson’s hypothesis has been definitely demolished by conclusive proof of the existence of the era, as that of the Mālavas, before A.D. 544, but the date has been supported on other grounds. Thus Dr. Hoernle [299] found it most probable that the victor who was meant by Vikramāditya in tradition was the king Yaçodharman, conqueror of the Hūṇas, and the same view was at one time supported by Professor Pathak, [300] who laid stress on the fact that Kālidāsa in his account of the Digvijaya, or tour of conquest of the earth, of the ancient prince Raghu in the Raghuvaṅça [301] refers to the Hūṇas, and apparently locates them in Kashmir, because he mentions the saffron which grows only in Kashmir.