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128 "Our literary language is still in a fluid stage, it is continually trying to adapt itself to new accessions of thought and emotion and to the constant progress in our national life. Necessarily the changes in our life and ideas are more rapid than they are in the countries whose influences are contributing to build the modern epoch of our renaissance. And, therefore, our language, the principal instrument for shaping and storing our ideals, should be allowed to remain much more plastic than it need be in the future when standards have been already formed which can afford a surer basis for our progress.

"But I have found that the direct influence which the Calcutta University wields over our language is not strengthening and vitalising but pedantic and narrow. It tries to perpetuate the anachronism of preserving the Pandit-made Begali swathed in grammar wrapings borrowed from a dead language. It is every day becoming a more formidable obsctacle in the way of our boys' acquring that mastery of their mothertongue which is of life and literature. The artificial language of a learned mediocrity, inert and formal, ponderous and didactic, devoid of the least breath of creative vitality, is forced upon our boys at the most receptive period of their life. I know this, because I have to connive, myself, at a kind of intellectual