Page 307 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

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 irrita­
bility of manner and an apathetic indifference which pro­
duced evil results in the government. Those who fol­ -
lowed 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 appear­
ance 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 accord­
ance 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 per­
spective, as a man whose little personal failings were over-