excellences of Kalidasa, Bharavi and Magha-all poets- Dandin's quality of felicity of diction (padalalitya). The reference here must be to a poet Dandin, other than the author of the Kavyadarśa in which we cannot find this quality. Nor prose work could have been meant, Bana's works claiming superiority to Dasakumaracarita. 4. The colophon of the Kävyädarsa describes the author as Acarya Dandin, an appellation which all subsequent writers have confirmed by tradition to distinguish him from his name- sake, the poet.2 These arguments, however, need not point to a separate Dandin. Even if we admit that the Kävyädarśa and the romance do not deserve the high panegyrics referred to above, there is no denying the fact that every author is known to have written works of varying degrees of excellence and perfection,³ and in the present case, it is more plausible to argue that the same Dandin as wrote the above two works also composed some other work or works, now lost, on which the high eulogies might have been based. Fortunately, we know of a lost work, a poem in double entendre (dvisaṁdhanakavya), ascribed to Dandin by Bhoja in his Srngaraprakāśa, and scholars have accepted it as the requisite third work of Dandin. It may be pointed out here that the literary feats expounded in Kavyadarśa and employed in Daśakumāracarita well befit his authorship of the poem in double entendre. It may be this kavya of Dandin from which some verses might have been quoted in the antholo- gies, and which, taken with his other works, elicited the words of high praise, especially referring to his felicity of expression, from his admirers who ranked him with Kālidāsa. We need not, therefore, embark on the unwarranted theory of a separate 1. Cp. below, pt. III, ch. IV 2. Cp. Agashe, op. cit., p. lvi 3. Cp. also Kale, op. cit., p. x 4. Spr. VII and IX Prakāśas; see below; cp. S.L. Katre: IHQ XXIV, p. 117; Kane op. cit. pp. 100-1; Keith: HSL pref., p. xvi fn; see below also. 5. Cp. KA III. 78-95; DKC VII; also see above; cp. G. H. Sastri: ASKS, Intro., p. v
