Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/174

 150 BENGALI LITERATURE or Miller’s Dictionary,' neither of which is hardly complete in itself, Carey achieved this useful and scholarly work after a laboar of thirty years and it deserves all the praise that has been bestowed upon it. Though, like his Grammar, it hardly belongs to the province of literature pure or proper, this book did much in stimulating the cause of literature and fixing the forms and expressions of the language, and for a long time it continued to be the standard work on the subject. The first volume was published in 1815 ; but the typographical form adopted being found likely to extend the work to an_ inconvenient size, it was subsequently reprinted in 1818 ;a second volume in two parts appeared by 1825. These three volumes comprehend about 2,000 quarto pages and about 80,000 words?, a number that equally denotes the copiousness of the language and the industry of the compiler. Besides the meaning of words, their derivation is given where-ever ascertainable. This is almost always the case as a great many of the words included are Sanscrit or Sanscritic. Hathed (Grammar, Preface. p. xx) had long since maintained “the impossibility of learning the Bengali dialect without a general and comprehensive idea of the Sanserit” on account of the close and intimate relation between the two. Following him, Carey himself always regarded Sanscrit as “the parent of nearly all the colloquial 3 dialects of India’”’® and “the current medium of conversa- tion amongst the Hindoos, until gradually corrupted by a number of local causes, soas to form the languages at 1 Said to be published in 1801. (Long’s Catalogue). ever, ecknowledges his.indebtedness to Forster in the Preface to his Dictionary. ’ Preface to Sanscrit Grammar, 1806.
 * Forster’s Vocabulary contained only 18,000 words. Carey, how-