Indian government, whose centre had hitherto always been in the upper provinces. The language of the province adjacent to the new capital naturally attracted the attention of the ruling race. The discovery of the existence of the Sanskrit language, which occurred at a time when the English were imperfectly acquainted with the great Gangetic valley, excited the imaginations of the few learned men who at that time resided in Bengal, and they readily gave credence to the assertion that this glorious and perfect language, which they had recently found to be the sister, if not the mother, of Greek and Latin, was also the mother of Bengali. The science of comparative philology was then in its cradle. Bopp's first work did not appear till 1816, and Jacob Grimm's a little later. Our Indian philologists had no means of testing the relationship between Sanskrit and Bengali; and even if they had possessed any such means, it is doubtful if they would have used them. The early inquirers in Bengal seem to have been very much ruled by their Pandits, and swallowed, with a credulity which amazes us, the most audacious assertions of the Brahmans.
Of course, in the matter of languages, the great Brahmanical theory was, and among the orthodox still to a great extent is, that Sanskrit, a divine invention, is the only true and correct Indian language, and that all deviations from Sanskrit observable in the conversation of the masses are corruptions arising from ignorance; and that to purify and improve the vernaculars—Bengali, for instance—every word should be restored to its original Sanskrit shape, and the stream be made to run upwards to its source. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for the world at large, this could not be done in the spoken language; but it might at least be done in books, especially in the numerous educational works which the English were then causing to be written. So completely did this idea prevail, that the honest old Tadbhavas were entirely banished from books, and a host of Tatsamas dug up from their graves, and
