Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/973

 -VII.] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 929 the ridiculous, Was not an unmixed evil. Their productions materially aided the cause of Bengali style in the long run. The pundits had a perfect command over the Sanskrit vocabulary and Sans- krit grammar and aimed at a pure grammatical style which was gradually introduced into Bengali prose, mainly through their influence and by their writ- ings. Under the salutary control of the European scholars these pundits were trained to write in a simple style and they no longer despised the collo- quial dialect from which they gradually imported a large number of simple and elegant expressions into the written language. Modern prose was developed both in purity of style and in resources of words by the efforts of these scholarly writers, and abundant proofs of this are to be found in the standard works of the 1gth century, written by them. In the prose works of I¢vara Chandra Vidyasagara we have that crowning success in prose composition to attain which the pundits had been struggling for half a century. The high sounding compounds were reduced in his writings to simpler and more elegant forms, the coarse and the vulgar element was entirely eliminated ; and living at this distance of time, as we do, we cannot help being struck with the inimitable grace and purity of his style. He saved our prose alike from pedantry and vulgarity and adopted a golden mean which only a finished master of Sanskrit and gifted literature could have been capable of achieving. The printing of Bengali books was a costly ‘The high a price of affair in those days. ne Bays seen that Dr. ০7 petated calculated the cost of printing ten thousand copies books. of the Bengali New Testament at Rs. 43750, and 117