cottage and is read and heard and appreciated alike by every class of the Hindu Community, whether high or low, rich or poor, young or old;" and its influence has been exercissed not only on the unlettered multitude but over the long series of authors who followed him. Here is the best illustration of popular literature.
The Bengalis and their literature are now exercising considerable influence on the minds of the Telugus. The quickening of Bengali literature is largely due to the stimulous of the literature of the West. "This resnaissance" says a writer in the Calcutta Review (January 1914) "has awakened the Indian mind more fully to the poetical resources of its own language. In Bengal the merely imitative stage inevitable on a first acquaintance with English and all that became available through English, may be said to have passed and in the reaching of a new stage. Rabindranath Tagore has been one of the great forces. Of high birth, young, precocious, possessing great attractiveness of person and manner and carrying lightly his many gifts of artistic power, he was the very hero that the romantic enthusiasm of the new movement demanded. One pictures him as gathering round himself, a circle of admirers, one might almost say devotees, such as a somewhat similar figure in literature, the beloved Robert Louis Stevenson attracted and held. The ad-
