History of Bengali Language and Literature c10.30

c10.30

Thus in the style of poetry as well as in its spirit, the court literature of Bengal presents a striking difference to the earlier Bengali works. The style and the spirit both became depraved—the former by a vain-glorious pedantry which made descriptions grotesque by their over-drawn niceties, the serious often passing into the burlesque—and the latter by scurrilous obscenities grosser than anything in Sterne, Smollett or Wycherley and by the introduction of characters like those of Hirā mālinī and Vidu Brāhmini—accessories to illicit love of the most revolting type. The descriptions of men and women are often marred by overcolouring like those of the beards of Hudibras described by Butler in a well known lengthy passage.