1881.] 
BID YAP ATI. 
35 
matter of our poet, but which almost entirely wanted the polish and 
felicity of expression of the old master-singer. These songs gradually 
took a form more and more Bangali, and the latest can hardly, so far as 
the form of the language goes, be distinguished from, the antique Bangali 
of Chandi Das and the Bidya Sundar : they thus naturally became more 
popular amongst the Bangali people than the real songs of Bidyapati, 
and speedily crowded out the latter from their memories. These spurious 
songs of Bidyapati have been more than once collected. They can all be 
found in that large heterogeneous mass of Bangali poetry called the Facia 
K.al'pa Taru , and have been republished in a connected form by Akshay 
Chandra Sarkar at Chinsura in a series of volumes called the Frdchma 
Kctvya Sangraha, in the Bangali year 1285 (A. D. 1878-79). Another 
expurgated edition has been published by S'arada Charana Mitra,* * * § (B. S. 
1285 = A. D. 1878-79) to which is prefixed an excellent Bangali intro¬ 
duction bringing up to date everything that was then known about the 
real Bidyapati of Bisphi. In the latter work, however, the editor is still 
under the impression that the poems he is editing are the work of the 
Tirhut poet, while nothing could be further from the fact. I have gone 
carefully through every poem in both these collections, and am in a posi¬ 
tion to state that not more than five or six of them altogether show even 
a resemblance to songs admitted up here to be the work of Bidyapati.f 
Even these are so distorted, both in language, and in rhythm, that iden¬ 
tification is by no means easy.J The songs in the Bangali recension will 
not even scan according to Maithili rules of prosody, much less can they 
be brought within the bounds of any rules of Maithili Grammar. § The 
fact is that both these Bangali collections are most interesting as showing 
the influence of Bidyapati over the Bangali mind, but in no way can they 
be considered as containing more than a very few lines really written by 
himself. 
The songs here given are, I believe, very nearly all that are known 
of Bidyapati in Tirhut. A glance at them will shew how different they 
are from their Bangali fellows. The majority of them have been collected 
* Vidyapatir Padavali, S'ri S'arada Charana Mitra sampadita; Calcutta, 71 
Cornwallis Street, S'ri S'rischandra Bhattacharyya, Printer and Publisher. 
f In the Prachma Kavya Sangraha the only songs which can be identified as 
bearing a resemblance, or as having lines common to admitted songs of Bidyapati 
are p. 15, No. 17; p. 64, No. 12 ; p. 72, No. 87 ; and p. 74, No. 85. 
f Compare Pra. Ka, San. p. 15, No. 17, (— No. 17, in S'arada Charana Mitra’s 
edition), with No. 1, in the present selections ; and these two recensions, (the Bangali, 
and the Maithili), correspond much more closely than any other similar pairs noted, 
§ Cf. such Bangali forms as used as substitutes for Maithili or 
