Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/87

II.] was mainly conducted by a system of barter. The higher classes seem to have been immensely rich and we find frequent descriptions of food being served to them on heavy golden plates. Their dinners were considered incomplete without at least some fifty different dishes, the tradition of which is not altogether unknown to our housewives even to this day.

The similes and metaphors used in the descriptions are very commonplace, and show that these rural folk were completely ignorant of those classical standards which now permeate even the lower stratum of Hindu society. The beautiful teeth of Rājā Gopī Chandra's wife are compared to Solā (bark of the cork-plant). Nowadays, any peasant of the most backward of Bengali villages would compare them to the seeds of a pomegranate, after the classical style.

But this perfectly artless song, in spite of its crudeness, is redeemed by the pathos which bursts forth in the cry of love of Adunā—the abandoned wife of Gopī Chānd. He turns ascetic and is about to leave her; she falls at his feet in tears, and with the devotion and loving entreaty of a gentle Hindu wife, says to her husband:—