Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/390

 366 BENGALI LITERATURE But his profession not only brought him fame, it also brought him money ; and we are told that he made good use of his fortune by spending it in erecting an A‘/da@ at Chinsurah and a temple at Chandan-nagar where all the great religious festivals were held with pomp and splendour. In 1821,' while returning from the house of the Raja of Kasimbazar where he had gone to sing during the Paja festival, he was attacked by illness which proved fatal and he died in the same year at the great age of seventy. He had three sons Jagatchandra, Ramchandra and Premehandra each of whom inherited his father’s profession, if not his talents, and formed Kabi-parties in later times; but no direct descendant of Nitai is alive to-day. Like Haru Thakur whom Nitai resembles so much in poetical character, Nitai possessed not a small share of the gift of exquisite song-writing. He wrote chiefly on sakhi sambad and ¢iraha but in both these he shows considerable power. We have already quoted one of his beautiful songs in which there is, if not the delicacy of artificial bloom and perfection, a strain of the real, the ineffable tone of poetry proper. Nitai had none of Ram Basu’s rhetorical tendency, finical nicety or straining after studied effects, but his songs possess not a little amount of unconscious freshness and beauty of tender sentiment and expression. Nitai however, like most of his compeers, is a very unequal poet ; spasmodic bursts of fine lines and couplets go hand in hand with insipid and hardly tolerable verses. Himself a Baisnab Bairagi he, among the Kabiwalas, could more successfully imitate the inimitable Baisnab lyries but the imitation often involves a peculiar lack of judgment which makes him reproduce the heresies rather than the virtues of © earlier poets. It is not necessary to give too many ' 1813 according to Kabioyaladiger Git, p. 110.