} পরিশিষ্ট—১ BABU BANKIM CHANDRA CHATTERJEE. í bv N. N. Ghosg. ] The kingdom of letters in Bengal is to-day without its lawful head, for Babu Bankim Chandra Chatterjee is no more. 'ast week we reported his illness, but before the news reached many of our readers the precious soul had left its ...ragile tenement, Babu Bankim Chandra fell a victim to the disease which has been the canker of so many a valuable life in this country, diabetes. If anything else was the immediate cause, it was itself a consequence. The sense of loss is universal in Bengal, at any rate among the classes that can read and write. There was no more conspicuous figure in Hengalee literature, none that had more deeply impressed the national mind, so far as it was conversant with letters at all. Next to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the books that have been most largely read in recent years in Bengal have been the novels of Babu Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. This is not the place to descant on their merits. It is suslicient y state that they are not at all like the first crude attempts at prose fiction among a people practically without literature, but they are works of rare merit which would be eminently worthy of a great writer among a great people in an era of literary expansion. Babu Bankim Chandra had a many-sided mind and a varied activity, but it is as a novelist that he will live. The critic, the philosopher, the official functionary of criminal justice, will be sunk in the man of letters. is novels will be read and admired as long as the Bengalee language or Bengalee life endures. It is said, however, that on his latter days he wished, like some other great men before
