Page:Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar, a story of his life and work.djvu/569

522 his eyes,—"About two years ago, I begged you for a pice; you kindly gave me a rupee. Out of that rupee, I bought rice for two annas, and laid out the remaining fourteen annas in dealing in mangoes. I made a little profit by selling them. By degrees I had a small stock, and I have now turned a chapman of petty miscellaneous articles. Would you, please, come and have a look into my shop." Vidyasagar then recollected the little incident of two years back. He blessed the youth and accompanied him to his shop, to his great satisfaction.

Even when so busily engaged in his labour of love at infected Burdwan, his own health completely broken down, he never forgot his literary work. Here he composed his Bhranti-Vilasa, compiled from Shakspeare's "Comedy of Errors." The language of the book is sweet, melodious, and humorous. What wonderful powers of translation did Vidyasagar possess. How beautifully he has clothed foreign language and ideas in his native dress, and made them peculiarly his own! The plot of the Comedy of Errors is rather complex. In spite of this difficulty, he has so nicely narrated it in his Bhranti-Vilas, that the excellent humour displayed in the original has not lost its force in the translation. To say the truth, Bhranti-Vilasa is an excellent novel in Bengali. The readers of Lamb's Tales of Shakespeare are well aware how difficult it is to turn a play