Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/311

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JOB CHARNOCK FOUNDS CALCUTTA
307

had figured in Hindu tradition. The native imagination was impressed by his forceful qualities and also probably was not less influenced by the depth of his insight into Oriental ways. Amongst his fellow countrymen Charnock excited different feelings. He had many detractors, especially in his later days, when the advances of age and the effects of nearly forty years' continuous residence in the tropics appear to have developed in him an irritability of manner and an apathetic indifference which produced evil results in the government. Those who followed him, and knew little of his earlier services, were not slow to depreciate his abilities, representing him as a very commonplace type of man who had been installed in a position for which he was little fitted either by talents or temperament. There was this amount of truth in the picture that Charnock was ill educated and plain of appearance and speech. His natural defects had probably been accentuated by an almost entire separation from European society during the greater part of his career. But that he was the cross-grained incompetent that he was represented to be by his immediate successors is not at all in accordance with the known facts of his history. These show him to have been a man of strong integrity and of shrewd judgment, eminently courageous not merely in the physical but in the higher and rarer moral sense. He was loyal to his employers in a period when the most lax views obtained as to the dictates of duty, and with that loyalty was mingled a zeal for his country's honour which was a brand of the purest patriotism. Time has done much to clear his memory from the aspersions of jealous and evil-minded contemporaries. He is seen now in truer perspective, as a man whose little personal failings were over-