( 6 ) ephemeral kind. They were working with unfit tools. Toru. Tutt wrote excellent poetry, but not of the national sort. Shoshee Chunder Dutt and Kasi Prosad Ghose were competent English scholars and wrote exceedingly well, but their English literature, the only literature they wrote, cannot last. Rev. Jal Behari Dey's Gobindo Samanta may have some place ir English literature only as a description of native live in Bengal by a Bengali. Literature of the abstract and universal sort may have a merit apart from style and life; national literature can never dwell permanently in any habitat save one of the national language. Dr. P. K. Ray and Babu Ashutosh Mukerjee have done no harm to themselves or their subjects by the former writing his Deductive Logic or the latter his Conic Sections in Fnglish ; and Babu Bankim Chandra would probably have done well to write in English, or at any rate to produce an Fnglish version of, his Dharma-tatwa. But it would have been a fatal blunder for Bankim Babu or any other Bengali to have attempted the writing of novels or any other kind of pure literature, in English. The admiration would be indiscriminate which would represent Bankim Babu as the greatest Bengali of modern times. He was great and indeed unapproached, in his own. sphere, that of prose fiction, but the same towering eminence had been reached by other Bengalis in their own several spheres. “Not in each but in all is human nature whole.” In the realm of letters alone, we are inclined to place two of our countrymen higher even than Bankim. They are Michael Madhu Sudan Dutta and Rajendra Iala Mitra. Datta was much inferior to Bankim in dramatic power, in knowledge of life. in insight into character. He was no thinker. But he was a poet, which Bankim was not. His muse was epic, not Iyric or didactic. . He had more originality and vigour, and, within his limits, did more creative work. He was more vivid
