Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/108

86 and Kritibâs wrote modern versions of the Mahabharat and Ramayan. Raja Krishna Chandra of Nadiya collected round him a small circle of poets, whose works are still very much admired, amongst whom Bhârat Chandra Rai holds the foremost place, though it is stated that his popularity is on the wane, in consequence of the rise of a sounder and more wholesome literature. A species of Fescennine verse called Kabi (probably for Kabit) was also highly popular in the last generation; these verses were recited by two companies of performers, who lavished the most pungent abuse and satire on each other, to the great delight of their audience. Following upon the poets of this school comes, a sort of Indian Rabelais, who enjoyed considerable reputation fifty years or even less ago. But Bengal has advanced so fast during the last generation that all these old-world authors are already left far behind in the dimness of a premature antiquity. And it is well that they should be. Bengali literature was not in their hands progressing in any definite or tangible direction, unless it were in that of filth and folly. Modern Bengali writers, all of whom are of the present age, may be divided into two classes, the Sanskritists and the Anglicists. The former are chiefly responsible for the solemn pompous style, overloaded with artificial Tatsamas, which they, and they alone, are able to understand, and which make the literature which they produce more like bad Sanskrit than good Bengali. The frigid conceits, the traditional epithets, the time-honoured phraseology, recur over and over again ad nauseam, and the threadbare legends of the Hindu creed are worked up into fresh forms with a "most damnable iteration." Opposed to these is a school of young writers, who pour forth novels, plays, and poems in considerable abundance, and of very unequal merit. Babu, who writes under the nom de plume of Tekchând Thâkur, has produced the best novel in the language, the Allâler gharer Dulâl, or "The Spoilt Child of the House