Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/171

 CAREY AND FORT WILLIAM COLLEGE 147 which, to the student of Bengali, is more than a mere treatise “intended to facilitate the acquiring of the ?) language”’. We have dwelt rather too long on Carey’s Dialogues but the importance of the book in the light of subsequent history can never be ignored. With regard to the style and language of all these dialogues it should be noticed that here we have, at the outset, the first trace of the opposition between the plain and 4 ৭৮ the ornate styles in prose which is to nate style first begun, dominate the rest of its history and reach to a crisis in the opposition of the ‘Alali style’ and the ‘Sanserit College style’ of the fifties. We shall have occasion to come back to this point here- after ; but itis to be noted here that this perpetually recurring antinomy in the history of prose style was for the first time clearly posed and definitely worked out by Carey’s simple colloquial prose on the one side, and the elaborate diction of the Pundits, especially of Mrtyuifijay, on the other. The best example of a chaste and simple style, more dignified than the ecollog uial prose of the Dra/ogues, more pure and correct than the prose of Ram Rim Basu or Chandi charan, yet less affected than the ornate and Itihas-mala, 1812. laboured style of Mrtyuiijay, is to be found in the J/Ahds-mala of Carey, which chronologically, however, comes after almost all the important Bengali publications of the Fort William College, except Prabodh-chandrika and Purug-parikga, and consequently had the advantage of having got more time for maturing in the meanwhile. It was printed and published in Sriraimpur in 1812, and, as its name implies, it is “a collection of stories in the Bengali language, collected