Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/963

 VII. j BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 019 died 400 years ago, in Bharata Chandra who lived 250 years after. The choes of Chandi Das’s songs, sung 500 years ago, were traceable in the lays of the modern kaviwa/a ; and the joys and sorrows, pain and pleasures, embodied in the Bengali litera- - ture extending over a period of 700 years worked in the minds of the whole Bengali race and found a ready response from every soul. The niceties and even the pedantry of our past literature proved no barrier, as I have said, to our masses in enjoying the productions of the artificial school of poetry which grew up under circumstances natural to the soil. But now the link was suddenly snapped. Our old literature was, as it were, walled up, and a new one substituted which the people found inaccessible to them, and thus Bengalis: ceased for half a century to understand the written Bengali of this age,—a time required by the masses to train themselves up to the new style and to the new sub- ject matter. Even now the works of some of our best modern poets, wrought in the simplest of terms, seem unintelligble to alarge section of the people, because of the European ideas in them with which they are not familiar ; and yet these readers can scale all the heights of the mystic metaphors of Bharata Chandra and Algol. Persian scholars no less than Sanskrit-knowing pundits contributed their share towards making the of Persian. style of modern prose in its early stages, cumber- some and corrupt to a degree ; and we have found such specimens of writing in Rama Rama Vasu’s Pratapaditya printed at Criramapore Press in 1800 A.D. Lipimala or model letters by this author
 * ; নর ০ Admixture