classical speech and literature of the learned and priestly class,
and living with his Master's sympathy among the people whom that
class oppresses, he takes the popular dialects which are instinct
with the life of the future; where they are wildly luxuriant he
brings them under law, where they are barren he enriches them from
the parent stock so as to make them the vehicle of ideas such as
Greek gave to Europe, and in time he brings to the birth nations
worthy of the name by a national language and literature lighted up
with the ideas of the Book which he is the first to translate.

This was what Carey did for the speech of the Bengalees. To them,
as the historians of the fast approaching Christian future will
recognise, he was made what the Saxon Boniface had become to the
Germans, or the Northumbrian Baeda and Wyclif to the English. The
transition period of English, from 1150 when its modern grammatical
form prevailed, to the fifteenth century when the rich dialects gave
place to the literary standard, has its central date in 1362. Then
Edward the Third made English take the place of French as the public
language of justice and legislation, closely followed by Wyclif's
English Bible. Carey's one Indian life of forty years marks the
similar transition stage of Bengali, including the parallel
regulation of 1829, which abolished Persian, made by the Mohammedan
conquerors the language of the courts, and put in its place Bengali
and the vernaculars of the other provinces.

When Carey began to work in Calcutta and Dinapoor in 1792-93 Bengali
had no printed and hardly any written literature. The very written
characters were justly described by Colebrooke as nothing else but
the difficult and beautiful Sanskrit Devanagari deformed for the
sake of expeditious writings, such as accounts. It was the new