Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/483

 APPENDIX I 459 nature of this passage, we must bear in mind that the connexion between old Bengali verse and old Bengali prose was extraordinarily close. There was a time, indeed, when writers of this literature hardly ever recognised the separate existence of prose as a vehicle of expression, classi- fying it, in theory, as a species of poetry itself and calling 1 গছাচ্ছন্দ or prose-metre and, in practice, making their prose, with alliteration, balanced accent, and other devices, look as much like their own verse as possible. It is a well-known fact that much of this prose, like the passage just quoted, interspersed in the midst of verse, was con- sciously adapted not only to read like verses but to be sung or chanted after the manner of Kathakas or rhapsodists. It is curious to note in this connexion that in many of these prose pieces we find the 4/ancta or signature of their respective authors in the same way as we find them in their poetical compositions. Anyone, studying the passage already quoted and those that follow even with moderate attention, will have no difficulty in agreeing to what has been said as to the close relation between early prose and verse. Not only the condensed mode and ordonnance of verse is followed here, but the symmetry of the lines, turns of phrases peculiar the passages intelligible in spite of the addition of a very imperfect glossary. The text is suspiciously corrupt and the editor himself acknowledges that he had no time to collate the three manuscripts with the published text but that he had got it done by his pundits, There is nowhere any indication of variations of readings given by the differ- ent manuscripts utilised, nor any attempt even to determine the correct reading. This is a most strange fact and renders the edition entirely valueless to a scientific student. The Sanya Puran as it stands now is an extremely difficult book to edit with all its indispensable critical spparatus and the Sahitya Parigat must be praised for ita boldness in undertaking to reprint it: but one would wish that the scholarship displayed in bringing out this edition had been equal to the boldness of this difficult undertaking.