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without a competitor in the opposite school who tried ini vain to rival him. Like the great satirist Akho, Samal was alone and single handed in the field. But both Samal and Premanand differed from Akho in this that they were not philosophers but pure poets, and as poets they have a higher and wider fame and influence among the masses. e
Prémanand is, by the latest concensus of loval critics, the greatest poet of Gujarat. He flourished at Baroda, but also passed parts of his life at Surat, as also at Nandurbar in Khandesh. Khandesh and Gujarat both seem to have enjoyed peaceful days under the Great. Moghuls Jehangir and Shah Jehan, and Premanand was not only a well-read man but a well-travelled man, who was not quite out of touch with the. splendour of the times. Like Akho he knew Sanskrit well, but, unlike: him, he had also studied the Great Purans and poems of that ancient language. He was not only a poet himself but was also the originator of a school of poets who lived under his guidance much like that cluster of glorious writers who gathered together round the person of Dr. Johnson. He brought up about thirty-seven people as his pupils and followers in poetry and made them compose poems according to their individual tastes and powers. These thirty- seven people inclided even twelve Indies and a few Banyas. His’ great aspiration was to raise up a
