a sweetness and pathos not ordinarily found in Indian music. The effect, however, is often marred by the discordant sound of the cymbals and drums by which it is accompanied. But if the music is peculiar, the language is no less so. Many of these songs are probably very modern, but others are undoubtedly the most ancient extant specimens of the Bengáli language; and in these the language is more like the Hindi of Tulsi Dás than the Bengáli of the present day. Doubtless early Bengáli and early Hindi differed little, if at all, from each other, and the present divergence is due to the operation of phonetic change in the same vernacular spoken by different branches of the same race, which were separated from each other by the revolution which followed the breaking up of the great empire of the Guptas of Magadha, or by others which are now lost in the silent darkness of Indian history.
It could scarcely be expected that so immense a collection as this Vaisnavite storehouse should be of uniform merit, and one may well wish that nine-tenths of these songs had never been composed: but among the other one-tenth there are gems of rare merit, which in tenderness of feeling have never been surpassed by anything in Bengáli literature, and barely equalled by the best writers of the present day.
This school constitutes the literature of Chaitanyaism, while the second we have to notice represents Bengáli Pauranism. The principal productions of this school are the Bengáli version of the Mahábhárata and the Rámáyana. Their authors, Kásidás and Krittibás, were not mere translators of the great Indian epics. They did not attempt so much in one sense, yet they achieved something more. Taking the story and the matter in general from their great originals, they gave free scope to their own fancy, and in many places established a claim to originality. We do not mean to say that they improved upon the originals, unless it were by greatly curtailing the tremendous bulk of the Sanskrit compositions; but the new matter which they added, while it detracts from the grandeur of the original conceptions of the Sanskrit poets, would, if embodied in some other form, have given them a certain position among original writers. Mukundarám Chakravarttí—Kabi Kankan—though he followed no Sanskrit original, belongs to the same school, and deservedly enjoys a higher reputation than either Krittibás or Kásidás. Many passages of his book are touchingly beautiful, but we cannot afford space for extracts. The language of these poets shows no traces of Hindi: but it is still very different from modern Bengáli. In poetic power they are decidedly inferior to the best of the Vaisnava poets.
The third class of writers we shall notice are those who flourished under the Nuddea Raja, Krishna Chandra. They enjoy an
