require a much more minute examination of the poem than the space at our command will allow. To Homer and Milton, as well as to Válmiki, he is largely indebted in many ways, but he has assimilated and made his own most of the ideas which he has taken, and this poem is on the whole the most valuable work in modern Bengali literature. The characters are clearly conceived and capable of winning the reader’s sympathy. The machinery, including a great deal that is supernatural, is skilfully and easily handled. The imagery is graceful and tender and terrible in turn. The play of fancy gives constant variety. The diction is richly poetic, and the words so happily chosen as constantly to bring up by association ideas congruous to those which they directly express. Nor is the verse broken up into couplets complete in themselves, in the Sanskrit fashion, but, abounding like Milton’s in variety of pause, it seems to us musical and graceful, as well as a fitting vehicle for passionate feelings.
Mr. Datta, however, is not faultless. He wants repose. The winds rage their loudest when there is no necessity for the lightest puff. Clouds gather and pour down a deluge, when they need do nothing of the kind; and the sea grows terrible in its wrath, when everybody feels inclined to resent its interference. All this bombast is unworthy of Mr. Datta’s genius and cultivated taste. Equally so is his constant repetition of the same images and phrases till they almost nauseate his readers. Nor is he altogether innocent of plagiarism. Homer and Valmiki are not unfrequently put under contribution, and Milton and Kalidasa have equal reason to complain.
Then again grammar might have been respected; and we must strongly protest against the constant introduction in imitation of the English idiom of such verbs as stutila, swanila, nirghosila.
We have given no extracts from the Meghnáda Badh, because we could give no adequate idea of its merits by isolated quotations. The poem is beautiful as a whole, but single passages would give no more idea of it than a brick could give of the building from which it was taken.
Of Mr. Datta’s other works, the Tilottamá Sambhava was the earliest. It is an epic like the Meghnada Badh, but far inferior to that poem. The subject is the birth of Tilottama, the fairest of Brahma’s creation, created for the express purpose of causing discord between the powerful Titan brothers, Sunda and Upasunda, who had expelled the Aryan gods from heaven.
We gladly turn from the Tilottamá to a less ambitious but more mature work, the Birángana. It is a series of poetical epistles from heroes’ wives to their husbands. It followed the Meghnada Badh, and there is the same gorgeous imagery, the
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