Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/141

II.] compositions. The same author's works were read all over a vast tract of country, which geographically transcended the limits of Modern Bengal and the Eastern Provinces. But words were changed by those who copied the manuscripts, conformably to the dialectical peculiarities of each district, so that one reads 'লাফ' in the old manuscripts of Krittivāsa found in Western Bengal where লাফ would be the usual form in a manuscript of the same work, recovered from the Eastern Provinces. The Vaiṣṅava works written in Bengali found readers in Orissā and Āssām. The people of those countries occasionally changed words in those works to suit the peculiar forms of their dialects. Many Bengali works have lately been found in manuscript forms in Orissā. Bengali, therefore, in the various forms charecteristic [sic] of provincial dialects presented a literature which used to be read and written by the people of a vast area bounded by the sea on the South,—extending to the Himalayan forests on the North of Old Gauḍa,—stretching so far as Magadha and Mithila in the West and reaching to the backwoods of Āssām and the out-skirts of Burmā on the East. The differences of dialect described, could have been easily synthetised by a common grammar, including Āssāmese. Uriyā and Bengali in one group. Bengali, recognised as the most advanced language in Eastern India, and fast assimilating the forms of different provincial dialects, for the purpose of propagating the Vaiṣṅava creed, might have been taken as the common vehicle for the expression of the thought of these three provinces; and in fact on the principle of natural selection, it had already, before the