পরিশিষ্ট । પદ પર છે Tatwabodhini Sabha. Modhu created the 5th era. Pundit Iswara Chandra Vidyasagara did not create an era. He wrote practical, offhand, catch-penny books that have not left a mark. Modhu deserves the first rank among our Bengali poets. Vidya pati, Chandidas, Mukundaram, Bharat Chandra, Ramprasada, Nidhu, and others, have all written littie better than brilliant ‘Common-places that are more the products of art than of inspiration-that show more constructiveness than enterprise and 1nvention. Like Pope and his imitators, they are mostly clever versifiers, good rhymers, but no true poets. They entertain us with fine metrical lines, but their writings, wanting in variety, resemble the entertainment given to Pompey, in which were a variety of dishes, but all made out of one hog-nothing but pork differently disguised Taking their stand upon their ancient native soil, they all work out of the same mine-that of Hindu myth. Their hobby is broken to pace only in a certain groove. But Modhu's Pakharaj is an adventurous courser into new fields and pastures. It is because that not only lie had been nursed in native milk, und been suckled by h1s mother geniuses Valmki, Vyasa, and Kalidasa ; but that he had been the guest at the banquets of other lustrious hosts who regaled him with many foreign dainties and delicacies, and opened up to him new horizons from which streamed new light, with new tints of colouring. His taste was refined by those critical canons of the West, the like of which does not exist in Sanskrit rhetotic. Modhu announced a new era to the Bengali lyre. He introduced the blank verse Indeed, our Sanskrit has been so melted down, refined, and moulded that not only our laws, but also our dictionary, have been transmitted in the harmony of verse Perhaps, they of old were of opinion, like Johnson, that blank verse was “verse only to the eye,” and therefore loved to indulge fn the jingle of rhythe." Modhu has taken a new ground altogether and founded a new school. His Meghnaabadha is an 'adventurous song'-a'thing unattempted in verse' by any bard of his native land From an European point of view, he has achieved a remarkable triumph. Modhu's English poems are to be regarded as proofs of his versatile powers. His fame rests upon his Bengali poems. These are many, among which Meghnadbadha holds the first rank. It is a chip of the epic-block-an epic torso, conceived without the beginning and the end. We are not to decide his merit by reference only to his originality. His Bengali words are cast upon the European model, and we are to see how far he has succeeded in introducing improvements borrowed from Western literature. I regret that I have not time for a leisurely review of his Meghmadhaatha from this stand-point. I can, only, simply say that the story has great purity from the gross inventions and exaggerations of the Pauranic writers. Modhu has kept all the great epic
