Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/958

 Ot4 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [ Chap. merely, but to the whole race. For hundreds of years its ideas had been made familiar to the whole country by innumerable ways and means. The whole race had assimilated these sentiments which found expression in their literature; and even the finished expressions, and the _ highly coloured metaphors that had characterised the productions of latter-day Sanskritic Bengali were not unintelligible to the people. The best evidence of this statement will be found in the fact that very low classes of men and even those who are thoroughly illiterate, have preserved up to the present, works like the Padmavat which are still being printed for them. This shows great advance- ment on the part of the people in mastering a highly wrought literary style, and the past litera- ture of Bengal was the medium through which the words of her poets and scholars were communicated to the lowly, the humble and the poor, who, often without knowing the alphabet, could understand the most difficult points in the Hindu philosophy or poetry under the educative influences of their own heredity and environment. But towards the end of the 18th century the The old = Vaisnavas and the CGaktas were practically driven school, : upset. out of the field. Our vernacular literature passed into the hands of Europeans ; and they trained a class of people to write manuals and school books after the manner of their own standard works. Mr. Wilkins trained Panchanana Karmakara in the art of punch-cutting, but this was not all; it was the Europeans and chiefly the missionaries who tratned the Pundits to write Bengali,—not