40
masterpieces of their master Premanand himself. The works of these postasters throw. a good deal of light over the conditions and tastes of the society in which they lived. They were not born poets, but except in a few cases there is an amount of artlessness about their poems, which is sure to invest them with interest for the historian of society and manners.
But the poet’ Premanand himself is a man of different stuff, He was, like the satirist Akho, very angry with the vain pride and haughtiness of the Sanskritists of his time, and one object of his above programme was to wage a long and successful war with the Sanskrit Pura- nis and others by produciug great works in Gujarati without stooping to the narrow-minded and uneducated prejudice ,which is only recently dying out, against en- riching a language of domestic ideas and words by dra- wing largely upon the only language which is near at hand and which is one of the richest languages the world has produced. He was amply rewarded by the achieve- ments of his pen. He, in fact, wanted to banish the vain-glorious Sanskritist, and not the rich jewels of the refined Sanskrit, from the masses, and eventually his great and true boast was that he had succseded in pla- cing his name and compositions on every singing tongue in his part of Gujarat. Time has wafted his poems over the whole of Gujarat, and while illiterate Brahman women can recite from memory the whole of many a
