Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/477

 MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 453 only by name and reputation and even all the names are not known. This form of literature, like the production of the Kabiwalas, was extemporised and was meant to contribute to the transient pleasure of its audience ; and ০৫: much of it was of the ephemeral The printed speci- type, The remarks already made on mens which have come রর. ee down belong to a this aspect of the Kabi-song apply ae 1825 with equal force to the case of the yatra and, like the Kabi-songs, it degenerated considerably in style and temper. No attempt was ever made to preserve them in print and much of this literature is now lost. Of the few well-known Yatrawalas, however, whose work has been more or less embodied in print, Krsna Kamal Bhattacharya was born about 1810, Gopal Ude about 1819 and Gobinda Adhikart, whose dates are not exactly known, was probably a con- temporary of both these. All these writers, therefore, fall outside the scope of this volume. It was about this time or a little later that the ya/r7 had already begun to dege- nerate. This degeneration was almost synchronous with and was therefore hastened by the change of taste and literary fashion of the 19th century which came to regard all these old forms of literature as out Degeneration of the of date and contemptible. With the yatra, synchronous ‘ with and hastened by Spread of these new ideas and new the change of literary taste in the 19th cen- tury. gradually established and dramas, written in imitation of European models, tolled the death-knell of the old yatr@ which still lingered but never found the same place in popular favour. It is not surprising therefore that in the preface to his Ratnatali, one of the earliest Bengali dramas written for this new stage, Ramnarayan Tarkaratna, himself an arthodox pundit, speaks in contemptuous terms of the literary methods, a regular stage was