Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/18

 xvl PREFACE only to workers in the same field. Although not more than a century has elapsed, the publications passed in review have already become very scarce and have seldom been satisfactorily reprinted ; and in search of them, I bad to ransack many libraries, great and small, departmental, public, and private, in Calcutta and outside, to which I could get access. Much of these interesting publications of the early nineteenth century is unhappily lost ; much, unless we hasten to the rescue, is fast vanishing ; while much, again, is scattered all over the country finding its way ultimately among many heterogenous collections, public and private. No complete history can ever be hoped for, tillall these old publications and files, more or less complete, of old news-papers have been disentombed. There is not a single news-paper office in Caleutta—and Caleutta is a fair example of the country in this matter— that possesses a complete file of its own issue : not a single library, public or private, which contains even the more important Bengali publications of the first half of the century. However interesting and useful stray extracts or stray passages from these papers or publications may be, it is utterly impossible to write the history of this or any other period of the country’s progress, political, social, or literary, as fully as could be done if these and other things had been carefully preserved or collected together. But in view of the fact that even what is now extant may in the course of a few years be irretrievably lost, it is time that we must seriously think of constructing a general view of the period out of the materials which still remain to us. The writer of this thesis, however, has been successful in having access to most of the important publications he has dealt with. For the privilege of reading and examining large number of books passed in review—only a trifling percentage of those mentioned was inaccessible to him