ege
and his appointment--How he studied Sanskrit--College Disputation Day
in the new Government House--Carey's Sanskrit speech--Lord Wellesley's
eulogy--Sir James Mackintosh--Carey's pundits--He projects the
Bibliotheca Asiatica--On the Committee of the Bengal Asiatic
Society--Edition and translation of the Ramayana epic--The
Hitopadesa--His Universal Dictionary--Influence of Carey on the civil
and military services--W. B. Bayley; B. H. Hodgson; R. Jenkins; R. M.
and W. Bird; John Lawrence.

When, in the opening days of the nineteenth century, William Carey was
driven to settle in Danish Serampore, he was the only member of the
governing race in North India who knew the language of the people so as
to teach it; the only scholar, with the exception of Colebrooke, who
could speak Sanskrit as fluently as the Brahmans. The Bengali language
he had made the vehicle of the teaching of Christ, of the thought of
Paul, of the revelation of John. Of the Sanskrit, hitherto concealed
from alien eyes or diluted only through the Persian, he had prepared a
grammar and begun a dictionary, while he had continually used its great
epics in preaching to the Brahmans, as Paul had quoted the Greek poets
on the Areopagus. And all this he had done as the missionary of Christ
and the scholar afterwards. Reporting to Ryland, in August 1800, the
publication of the Gospels and of "several small pieces" in Bengali, he
excused his irregularity in keeping a journal, "for in the printing I
have to look over the copy and correct the press, which is much more
laborious than it would be in England, because spelling, writing,
printing, etc., in Bengali is almost a new thing, and we have in a
manner to fix the orthography." A little later, in a letter to
Sutcliff, he used language regarding the sacred books of the Hindoos
which finds a parallel more than eighty years after in Professor Max
Mueller's preface to his series of the sacred books of the East, the
translation of which Carey was the first to plan and to begin from the
highest of all motives. Mr. Max Mueller calls attention to the "real
mischief that has been and is still being done by the enthusiasm of
those pioneers who have opened the first avenues through the
bewildering forests of the sacred literature of the East." He declares
that "Eastern nations themselves would not tolerate, in any of their
classical literary compositions, such violations of the simplest rules
of taste as they have ac