Not unnaturally, efforts [352] have been made on the score of metre to ascertain the dates of the plays inter se, and in relation to the rest of the acknowledged work of Kālidāsa. The result achieved by Dr. Huth would place the works in the order Raghuvaṅça, Meghadūta, Mālavikāgnimitra, Çakuntalā, Kumārasambhava, and Vikramorvaçī. But the criteria are quite inadequate; the Meghadūta has but one metre, the Mandākrāntā, which occurs so seldom in the other poems and plays that any comparison is impossible, [353] and the points relied upon by Dr. Huth are of minimal importance; they assume such doctrines as that the poem which contains the fewest abnormal caesuras is the more metrically perfect and therefore the later, while the poem which has the largest number of abnormal forms of the Çloka metre is artistically the more perfect and so later. A detailed investigation of the different forms of abnormal caesuras reveals the most perplexing counter-indications of relative date, and the essential impression produced by the investigations is that Kālidāsa was a finished metrist, who did not seriously alter his metrical forms at any period of his career as revealed in his poems, and that there is no possibility of deducing any satisfactory conclusions from metrical evidence. The fact that the evidence would place the mature and meditative Raghuvaṅça, [354] which bears within it unmistakable proofs of the author’s old age, before the Meghadūta and long before the Kumārasambhava, both redolent of love and youth, is sufficient to establish its total untrustworthiness. VII CANDRA, HARṢA, AND MAHENDRAVIKRAMAVARMAN 1. CANDRA OR CANDRAKA Some mystery exists as to the identity and character of Candra as a dramatist. [355] We have in a Tibetan version a Lokānanda, a Buddhist drama telling of a certain Maṇicūḍa, who handed over his wife and children to a Brahmin as a sign of supreme generosity, which is ascribed to Candragomin, the grammarian, in whose Çiṣyalekhā is found a verse ascribed to Candragopin in the Subhāṣitāvali. If this is the dramatist Candaka or Candraka, who is placed by Kalhaṇa under Tuñjina of Kashmir, and who rivalled the author of the Mahābhārata in a drama, is wholly uncertain. The grammarian must have lived before A.D. 650, as he is cited in the Kāçikā Vṛtti though not by name; a more precise date it is impossible to give, for his reference to a victory of a Jarta over the Hūṇas cannot be made precise until we know what Jāṭ prince is referred to, though Yaçodharman has been suggested. The identification by Lévi of Candra with a person of that name mentioned by I-Tsing as living in his time is seemingly impossible, though I-Tsing ascribes to him the verse found in the Çiṣyalekhā mentioned above; the verse is lacking in the Tibetan version and I-Tsing may have made a slip. His contemporary seems to have been a Candradāsa, and to have dramatized the Viçvantara legend.