Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/500

 476 BENGALI LITERATURE them, these writers never chose to- imitate the later sesquipedalian Sanscrit prose style of Kadambari or Harsacharita. Much has been written, however, on the Sanscrit influence which is supposed to have come through the Aathakas or professional story-tellers, whose manner and method of exposition is said to have considerably moulded the narrative or descriptive literature of the type in question: but it must be admitted that though sometimes their “set passages” evince a highly artistic or poetic style, their bombastically ornate diction and artificial arrangement, their predilection for. sanseritie forms and long-balanced sentences, their highly eadenced rhetorical eloquence label their prose-passages at once as essentially one of the ornate kind showing little colour of resemblance to the type of prose we are discussing. In the absence of any material to go upon, it is impossible to indicate how-far the experiment in descrip- tive prose of the literaay kind, such as we find in the Brnaban-lila or Bradiba-parikrama, was followed upon in any other prose-writing of the period but the existence and popularity of such contemporary descriptive poems as Kasi-parikrama of Jayanarayan would seem to indicate, inspite of occasional and timid tres- ei prose pass, the still exclusive monopoly of verse in the domain of such litera- ture. The excursion of prose, however, beyond the narrow limits of metaphysical matter was an attempt the lesson of which was perhaps not wholly lost. From the few prose pieces of that century which have come down to us, we find application of prose in treatises on law, logie, and medicine, subjects hitherto attempted, as all subjects were, in verse. Although only afew such works have yet been discovered, it is quite