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The verse collected in this volume represents about one hundred years of poetical effort; and has its origin in England's introduction into India of western education. It is worth recording that the first volume of Bengali verse in English appeared five years before Thomas Babington Macaulay gave judgment in favour of the teaching of English in Indian schools and colleges. The fact is significant. It shows that the movement towards English instruction had begun before the administration of Lord William Bentinck, and had achieved definite results before the famous Resolution of 1835.

From this date the character of education in India was fixed. An educational policy had been conceived and adopted—briefly, the teaching of English language and literature. It was the good fortune of Bengal that this policy was born in the spacious days when the literary life of England was brilliant and vigorous; and when, amongst the English in India, there were men who had lived largely in the life of their time. The shadow of a few great names lies broad over the scholastic history of the early 19th century in Bengal. Sir William Jones had handed down a rich scholarly tradition. Dr. John Leyden, the friend and colleague of Sir Walter Scott, had kept alive the fires of Border Song amid the fevers of Bengal and Java. Bishop Heber was a poet of rare delicacy as well as a strenuous traveller and priest. Before he left India in 1832, Horace Hayman Wilson had laid deep the foundations of his Sanskrit learning; and Henry Meredith Parker, by his witty occasional