Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/414

378 from the country people, to whom he holds out a menace. The poet tells how he dreamt a dream in which Dakṣin Rāi appeared to him and said:—

"If there is any one to be found, who does not like your poem, be sure, he will be devoured by tigers with his whole family."

So we find in this literature much that is crude, and suited only for a rustic population. But many of its good works, which form a part of the Renaissance literature, conform to a high classical standard, and there are descriptions of great beauty and marked effects in word-painting, which in a subsequent age developed into a high-flown and ornate style,—the characteristic of the age of Bhārat Chandra. The worshippers of Manasā Devī and Maṅgal Chandī were to be found all over Bengal, and many eminent poets were drawn into writing poems in their honour, and these works are characterised by a true literary excellence; but there were other poems, which show a crudeness befitting rustic literature, as that on the god of tigers just referred to.

As already explained, the illeterate villagers of Bengal worshipped many gods and goddesses under the influence of Tāntrik Buddhism, and the Hindu priests gradually took these up, and associating them with the deities of the Hindu pantheon as related in the Purāṇas, Hinduised the whole spiritual atmosphere of Bengal. They connected the fables current in the country with the Çāstrik stories and thus bridged over a gap, created by the loss of Buddhistic ascendency and its traditions in Bengal.