28 A HISTORY OF HINDI LITERATURE preached, but to Rama as the invisible God, not as an incarnation. There was however another group of Vaishnavas who worshipped God under the form of another incarnation, namely Krishna. Like the Ramaite cult the worship of Krishna also had its beginnings in the centuries before this period, but about this time received a new impetus, which was marked, as well as furthered, by the use of the vernacular for its religious literature. Sometimes it was the child Krishna who was especially thought of as an object of worship, but more often it was that aspect of Krishna's life which was concerned with his relation to Radha and the other Gopis that received most attention. Radha-Krishnaite verse goes back to the Sanskrit Gttd Gozmida of Jayadeva in the twelfth century, and as early as the fourteenth century Krishna hymns appeared in Bengali. Between 1450 and 1480 there flourished a Gujarat! poet named Narsingh Mehta who wrote Radha-Krishna lyrics in that language. He is also credited with having composed similar verses in Hindi. Vidyapati Thakur, who lived at Bisapi in the Darbhanga district of Bihar in the middle of the fifteenth century, is one of the most famous Vaishnava poets of Eastern India. He was the founder of a school of master-singers which afterwards spread all over Bengal. Little is known of his life, but he was the author of several Sanskrit works. His chief fame however rests on his sonnets in the Maithili dialect of Bihari. In these he uses the story of the love which Radha bore to Krishna as an allegory to describe the relation of the soul to God. Many of these were after- wards adapted to Bengali and made popular by Chaitanya, and Vidyapati has had many imitators. His poems possess great literary merit and he has had a great influence on the literature of the Eastern part of India. Umdpati was probably a contemporary of Vidyapati, and also wrote Krishnaite songs both in in Maithili and in Bengali.
