read. "In every town and village in the Deccan and Konkan, especially during the rains, the pious Maratha will be found enjoying with his family and friends the recitation of the Pothi of Shridhar [b. 1679], and enjoying it indeed. Except an occasional gentle laugh, or a sigh, or a tear, not a sound disturbs the rapt silence of the audience, unless when one of those passages of supreme pathos is reached, which affects the whole of the listeners simultaneously with an outburst of emotion which drowns the voice of the reader." (Acworth's Ballads, xxvii.)
The simplicity and uniformity of early Maratha society are also reflected in the language. Their poetry consisted of short jingles and apopthegms or monotonous metrical couplets like the epics,—with no lyric outburst, no long-flowing sonorous verses, no delicate play on the whole gamut of sounds. Like the other daughters of Sanskrit, the Marathi vernacular had no literary prose till well into the 18th century. The prose that was created by the official class in their letters and chronicles, was a barbarous jargon composed nearly three-fourths of Persian words and grotesque literal translations of Persian idioms. The highly Sanskritised, elegant and varied prose that is now used, is a creation of the British period. (Rajwade, viii. Intro, fully discusses the Persian element.)
"On the whole it may be said that the written [Marathi] poetry, consisting as it does in such very
