History of Bengali Language and Literature c13.66

c13.66

"I can say with the utmost confidence that it is a work which will ensure the permanence of your name and loving labour in the annals of Bengali literature. I am thinking, as soon as I am permitted time, of writing a review of it. For the present, I will content myself with saying that it is a book of the merits and usefulness of which I entertain the very highest opinion. In wealth of details, it rivals Morley's First Sketch; in power of graphic language, it rivals Taine; in subtlety of critical analysis, it rivals Dowden. Your close study of the earliest classics in Bengali has been helpful in investing your language with a delicacy, a refinement, a directness which relieves and vivifies the minutiae of details that your industrious research has brought to light, I think, for the first time. I anxiously await the publication of your second volume, and earnestly wish that you will soon recover health and spirit for that undertaking.