Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/16

 xiv PREFACE although necessary and useful if kept within bounds, are intended merely as artifices of classification, for a better understanding of the general drift. There can be no hard-and-fast limits as encompassing an epoch, and history must unfold itself without any preconceived notion of artificial dates and eras. It is for this reason that in the present volume, the activity of the European writers has been traced for a certain unity of treatment down to the fifties, although after 1825 their influence was on the wane, and other movements were becoming prominent. ‘On the other hand, I have thought it simpler to defer an enquiry into the first glimmerings of the struggle between Anglicism and Orientalism and the history of English education in its bearing on Bengali literature as well as the account of the rise of the Reforming Young Bengal under the leadership of David Hare, Derozio and others to the beginning of a separate volume, instead of dealing with them piecemeal at the end of the present essay. Some of the works of Raja Ram Mohan Ray and his colleagues belong chronologically to this period, but from the standpoint of literary history, they embody a subsidiary movement which comes into relief a little later, and are, therefore, deliberately reserved for later treatment. With- out therefore disturbing in the least the true historical perspective, I have never attempted to force an account of any movement, literary or otherwise, into strict chronolo- gical shackles, but I have sometimes boldly looked forward while at others paused fora profitable retrospect, always bearing in mind that the natural course of events seldom takes as smooth and orderly development as we may desire. With regard to transliteration of Bengali words, I have generally followed, with the exceptions noted below, the international method agreed upon by Orientalists for Sanscrit. In some cases where the name of a place or a