DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.34827#0186
I /O Z,Z/G cn. xiv.
possessing great activity of body and mind, remarkable talent
for, and application to, public business, a love of literature, and
a degree of almost universal information, such as I have met
with in no other person similarly situated, and manners and
conversation of the most amiable and interesting character.
While he has seen more of India and the adjoining countries
than any man now living, and has been engaged in active poli-
tical, and sometimes military duties since the age of eighteen,
he has found time not only to cultivate the languages of Hin-
dustan and Persia, but to preserve and extend his acquaintance
with the Greek and Latin classics, with the French and Italian,
with all the elder and more distinguished English writers, and
with the current and popular history of the day, both in poetry,
history, politics, and political economy. With these remark-
able accomplishments, and notwithstanding a temperance
amounting to rigid abstinence, he is fond of society, and it is a
common subject of surprise with his friends in what hours of
the day or night he finds time for the acquisition of knowledge.
' His policy, so far as India is concerned, appeared to me
peculiarly wise and liberal, and he is evidently attached to, and
thinks well of, the country and its inhabitants. His public
measures, in their general tendency, evince a steady wish to
improve their present condition. No government in India pays
so much attention to schools and public institutions for educa-
tion. In none are the taxes lighter, and in the administration
of justice to the natives in their own languages, in the estab-
lishment of punchayets, in the degree in which he employs the
natives in othcial situations, and the countenance and familiarity
which he extends to all the natives of rank who approach him,
he seems to have reduced to practice almost all the reforms
which had struck me as most required in the system of govern-
ment pursued in those provinces of our Eastern empire which
I had previously visited. His popularity (though to such a
feeling there may be individual exceptions) appears little less
remarkable than his talents and acquirements, and I was struck
by the remark I once heard, that " all other public men had
their enemies and their friends, their admirers and their
possessing great activity of body and mind, remarkable talent
for, and application to, public business, a love of literature, and
a degree of almost universal information, such as I have met
with in no other person similarly situated, and manners and
conversation of the most amiable and interesting character.
While he has seen more of India and the adjoining countries
than any man now living, and has been engaged in active poli-
tical, and sometimes military duties since the age of eighteen,
he has found time not only to cultivate the languages of Hin-
dustan and Persia, but to preserve and extend his acquaintance
with the Greek and Latin classics, with the French and Italian,
with all the elder and more distinguished English writers, and
with the current and popular history of the day, both in poetry,
history, politics, and political economy. With these remark-
able accomplishments, and notwithstanding a temperance
amounting to rigid abstinence, he is fond of society, and it is a
common subject of surprise with his friends in what hours of
the day or night he finds time for the acquisition of knowledge.
' His policy, so far as India is concerned, appeared to me
peculiarly wise and liberal, and he is evidently attached to, and
thinks well of, the country and its inhabitants. His public
measures, in their general tendency, evince a steady wish to
improve their present condition. No government in India pays
so much attention to schools and public institutions for educa-
tion. In none are the taxes lighter, and in the administration
of justice to the natives in their own languages, in the estab-
lishment of punchayets, in the degree in which he employs the
natives in othcial situations, and the countenance and familiarity
which he extends to all the natives of rank who approach him,
he seems to have reduced to practice almost all the reforms
which had struck me as most required in the system of govern-
ment pursued in those provinces of our Eastern empire which
I had previously visited. His popularity (though to such a
feeling there may be individual exceptions) appears little less
remarkable than his talents and acquirements, and I was struck
by the remark I once heard, that " all other public men had
their enemies and their friends, their admirers and their