mātar jīva kim etad añjalipuṭe tātena gopāyyate vatsa svādu phalam prayacchati na me gatvā gṛhāṇa svayam mātraivam prahite guhe vighaṭayaty ākṛṣya saṁdhyāñjalim çambhor bhinnasamādhir uddharabhaso hāsodgāmaḥ pātu vaḥ. ‘O mother.—My life.—What is it that my father guards so carefully in the palm of his hand?—Dear one, it is a sweet fruit.—He will not give me it.—Go thyself and take it.—Thus urged by his mother, Guha seizes the closed hands of his sire as he adores the Twilight and drags them apart; Çiva, angry at the interruption of his devotion, stays his wrath at sight of his son and laughs: may that laughter protect you.’ [360] 2. THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE DRAMAS ASCRIBED TO HARṢA Three dramas, as well as some minor poetry, have come down to us under the name of Harṣa, unquestionably the king of Sthāṇvīçvara and Kanyakubja, who reigned from about A.D. 606 to 648, [361] the patron of Bāṇa who celebrates him in the Harṣacarita and of the Chinese pilgrim Hiuan-Tsang who is our most valuable source of information on his reign. That the three plays are by one and the same hand is made certain in part by the common ascription in a verse in the prologue mentioning Harṣa as an accomplished poet, partly by the recurrence of two verses in the Priyadarçikā and the Nāgānanda and of one in the former play and the Ratnāvalī, and above all by the absolute similarity of style and tone in the three works, which renders any effort to dissociate them wholly impossible. The question of their actual authorship was raised in antiquity; for, while Mammaṭa in his Kāvyaprakāça [362] merely refers to the gift of gold to Bāṇa—or Dhāvaka in some manuscripts—by Harṣa, the commentators explain this of the Ratnāvalī, which was passed off in Harṣa’s name. This is, however, not in any way borne out by early tradition; I-Tsing [363] clearly refers to the dramatization of the subject of the Nāgānanda by Harṣa and its performance, and in the Kuṭṭanīmata [364] of Dāmodaragupta, who lived under Jayāpīḍa of Kashmir (A.D. 779–813), a performance of the Ratnāvalī, ascribed to a king, is mentioned. The ascription to Bāṇa has nothing even plausible in it, so disparate are the styles of the dramas and the Harṣacarita, and we have the option of believing that Harṣa wrote them himself with such aid as his Paṇḍits might give, or of accepting them as the work of some unknown dramatist, who allowed the king to claim the credit for them. 3. THE THREE DRAMAS The Ratnāvalī and the Priyadarçikā are closely connected both in subject-matter and form; they are Nāṭikās, each in four Acts; their common hero is Udayana, whom Bhāsa already celebrated, and the common theme one of his numerous amourettes. The Ratnāvalī, [365] in special, has found favour in the text-books of the drama, and has served to illustrate the technical rules.