xon 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 vaishnava faith
of the Nuddea reformer Chaitanya which led to the composition of the
first Bengali prose.[22] The Brahmans and the Mohammedan rulers alike
treated Bengali--though "it arose from the tomb of the Sanskrit," as
Italian did from Latin under Dante's inspiration--as fit only for
"demons and women." In the generation before Carey there flourished at
the same Oxford of India, as Nuddea has been called, Raja Krishna Rai,
who did for Bengali what our own King Alfred accomplished for English
prose. Moved, however, chiefly by a zeal for Hindooism, which caused
him to put a Soodra to death for marrying into a Brahman family, he
himself wrote the vernacular and spent money in gifts, which
"encouraged the people to study Bengali with unusual diligence." But
when, forty years after that, Carey visited Nuddea he could not
discover more than forty separate works, all in manuscript, as the
whole literature of 30,000,000 of people up to that time. A press had
been at work on the opposite side of the river for fifteen years, but
Halhed's grammar was still the only as it was the most ancient printed
book. One Baboo Ram, from Upper India, was the first native who
established a press in Calcutta, and that only under the influence of
Colebrooke, to print the Sanskrit classics. The first Bengali who, on
his own account, printed works in the vernacular on trade principl