ԳՏ Ջ বঙ্গভাষা ও সাহিত্য a contribution of the first rank to such a subject. The tracing of the listory ol the Bengali language and literature in this University is one of the most welldeserved studies of Bengal. To it is due, in fact, the monumental and now classical History of the Bengali Language and literature (1912);-in which, so far as our studies go, we value most the accurate estimate of the influence of Chaitanya on that literature-accompanied by the grand Bengali Anthology Banga Sahitya Parichaya, I9I4, and then above all the pleasing and erudite researches on Vaishnab literature and the connected religious reform of Chaitanya. A world wholly legendary depicted with the homely tenderness in most secluded locality of Bengal and half conceived in the Buddhistic epoch with delicate phantasy and fondness; the world in which Rabindranath Tagore ultimately attained his full growth is revivel with every seduction of art in the luminous pages of this beautiful book. The author came in touch with this in his first days of youth when he was a village teacher in East Bengal and he now wishes to reveal it by gathering together the most secluded spirit and also the legend collected in four delicit is volumes of l). R Mazumdar, yet to be translated. A spirit of renunciation in the devotion of wives in the love of tender and Sorrowful ladies in eagerness for patient sacrifice carry us back, as we have said, to the Buddhistic epoch of Bengal; it rises as an ideal of life and is transmitted to future generations traversed by the Mussalinani faith which also is pervaded by so many Buddhistic elements. Malancha, the sublime female incarnation of such an ideal-whose legend is translated in the last pages of this volume-the Lady wholly spiritual, a soul heroic in its devoted renunciltion, mistress of her body who reveals in herself qualities that essentially belong to idea, a creature of the soul, shaped by the aspiration to Come into contact with the external world. Malancha loses her eyes and her hands, but so strong is her desire to see her husband that her eyes grow again and such is her desire to serve him that her hands also grow again. In the popular narration the prose often assumes a poetic movement and metrical form. The archaic language that reminds us of remote antiquity 1ヘ converted into lyric charm and becomes knotty in the prose, making us this pensively of the Vedic hymnology that entered the epic of Mahavarat.' (Translated from the original Italian ).
