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xxii lid may be unhinged,—new wine may burst old bottles. The colliding forces of divergent stages of civilization have produced a literature that, for want of a better expression, may be called a hybrid compromise between eastern and western ideas. So we find that the Bengali novel is to a great extent an exotic. It is a hothouse plant which has been brought from a foreign soil; but even crude imitations are better than the farragos of original nonsense, lists of which appear from time to time in the pages of the Calcutta Gazette.

The above remarks are merely general, and there exist of course bright and notable exceptions, among whom may be mentioned the names of Peary Chund Mitter (the father of Bengali novelists), Bunkim Chandra Chatterji, Romesh Chandra Dutt, and Tarak Nath Ganguli. The "Allaler Gharer Dulal" of the first-mentioned author may be called a truly indigenous novel, in which some of the reigning vices and follies of the time are held