Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/116

 92 BENGALI LITERATURE however, was confined principally to revenue and judicial terms, and the more common and daily shifting colloquial expressions. But the greatest difficulty was felt in orthography which was in a_ hopelessly chaotic state, in these ante-printing days. ‘‘ There never having been ” says Forster, ‘‘ a native Bengalee grammarian nor indeed any author of note..... whs might be considered asa standard, the orthography has consequently never been fixed ; and being current over an extensive country and among an illiterate people, almost every word has been and continues in one district or other to be variously spelt, and not infrequently so disguised as to render it difficult to recognise it, when met in its gepuine form in Songskrit. In such cases, I have not scrupled to adopt Songskrit orthography, unless I found the majority of the people whom I consulted, coneur in any particular vitiated mode of spelling it.” In spite of these difficulties, however, Forster succeeded in compiling one of the most valuable and painstaking lexicon of the language ever published, and the eulogy of Marshman that Forster was the “most eminent Bengali scholar till the appearance of Dr. Carey”! is fully justified. The year in which Forster’s Vocabulary was published saw another memorable but at that time an apparently unimportant event—the landing of a band of missionaries on the banks of the Ganges and the starting of a mission at Srirampur. A year later, the Fort William College The advent of the missionaries. only style to which authors applied themselves and studied prose was utterly unknown”. The biographer of Dr. Carey relates how (Smith, cp. cit. p. 202) when Carey visited Nadiya, not many years ago the illustrious centre of Bengali literature, “ he could not discover more than 40 separate works, all in manuscripts, as the whole literature of 30,000,000 of people up to that time”. 1 Marshman, Life and Times of Carey etc., vol. i., p. 71.