This fearful prodigy was succeeded by that desolating disaster, the Serampore fire. I could scarcely believe the report; it was like a blow on the head which stupefies. I flew to Serampore to witness the desolation. The scene was indeed affecting. The immense printingoffice, two hundred feet long and fifty broad, reduced to a mere shell. The yard covered with burnt quires of paper, the loss in which article was immense. Carey walked with me over the smoking ruins. The tears stood in his eyes. 'In one short evening,' said he,' the labours of years are consumed. How unsearchable are the ways of God! I

had lately brought some things to the utmost perfection of which they seemed capable, and contemplated the missionary establishment with perhaps too much self-congratulation. The Lord has laid me low, that I may look more simply to him.' Who could stand in such a place, at such a time, with such a man, without feelings of sharp regret and solemn exercise of mind. I saw the ground strewed with half-consumed paper, on which in the course of a very few months the words of life would have been printed. The metal under our feet amidst the ruins was melted into misshapen lumps-the sad remains of beautiful types consecrated to the service of the sanctuary. All was smiling and promising a few hours before-now all is vanished into smoke or converted into rubbish! Return now to thy books, regard God in all thou doest. Learn Arabic with humility. Let God be exalted in all thy plans, and purposes, and labours; He can do without thee."

The

Carey himself thus wrote of the disaster to Dr. Ryland :— "25th March 1812.-The loss is very great, and will long be severely felt; yet I can think of a hundred circumstances which would have made it much more difficult to bear. Lord has smitten us, he had a right to do so, and we deserve his corrections. I wish to submit to his sovereign will, nay, cordially to acquiesce therein, and to examine myself rigidly to see what in me has contributed to this evil.

"I now, however, turn to the bright side; and here I might mention what still remains to us, and the merciful circumstances which attend even this stroke of God's rod; but I will principally notice what will tend to cheer the heart of every one who feels for the cause of God. Our loss, so far as I can see, is reparable in a much shorter time than

1812

HIS LOSSES IN THE FIRE.

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I should at first have supposed. The Tamil fount of types was the first that we began to recast. I expect it will be finished by the end of this week, just a fortnight after it was begun. The next will be the small Devanagari, for the Hindostani Scriptures, and next the larger for the Sanskrit. I hope this will be completed in another month. The other founts, viz. Bengali, Orissa, Sikh, Telinga, Singhalese, Mahratta, Burman, Kashmeerian, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese, will follow in order, and will probably be finished in six or seven months, except the Chinese, which will take more than a year to replace it. I trust, therefore, that we shall not be greatly delayed. Our English works will be delayed the longest; but in general they are of the least importance. Of MSS. burnt, I have suffered the most; that is, what was actually prepared by me, and what owes its whole revision for the press to me, comprise the principal part of MSS. consumed. The ground must be trodden over again, but no delay in printing need arise from that. The translations are all written out first by pundits in the different languages, except the Sanskrit which is dictated by me to an amanuensis. The Sikh, Mahratta, Hindostani, Orissa, Telinga, Assam, and Kurnata are re-translating in rough by pundits who have been long accustomed to their work, and have gone over the ground before. I follow them in revise, the chief part of which is done as the sheets pass through the press, and is by far the heaviest part of the work. Of the Sanskrit only the second book of Samuel and the first book of Kings were lost. Scarcely any of the Orissa, and none of the Kashmeerian or of the Burman MSS. were lost-copy for about thirty pages of my Bengali dictionary, the whole copy of a Telinga grammar, part of the copy of the grammar of Punjabi or Sikh language, and all the materials which I had been long collecting for a dictionary of all the languages derived from the Sanskrit. I hope, however, to be enabled

to repair the loss, and to complete my favourite scheme, if my life be prolonged."

Little did these simple scholars, all absorbed in their work, dream that this fire would prove to be the means of making them, as well as the work, famous all over Europe and America as well as India. Men of every Christian school, and men interested only in the literary and secular side of their enterprise, had their active sympathy called out. The mere money loss, at the exchange of the day, was not under ten thousand pounds. In fifty days this was raised in England and Scotland alone, till Fuller, returning from his last campaign, entered the room of his committee, declaring "we must stop the contributions." In Greenock, for instance, every place of worship on one Sunday collected money. In the United States Mr. Robert Ralston, a Presbyterian, a merchant of Philadelphia, who as Carey's correspondent had been the first American layman to help. missions to India, and Dr. Staughton, who had taken an interest in the formation of the Society in 1792 before he emigrated, had long assisted the translation work, and now that Judson was on his way out they redoubled their exertions. In India Thomason's own congregation sent the missionaries £800, and Brown wrote from his dying bed a message of loving help. The very newspapers of Calcutta caught the enthusiasm; one leading article concluded with the assurance that the Serampore press would, "like the phoenix of antiquity, rise from its ashes, winged with new strength, and destined, in a lofty and long enduring flight, widely to diffuse the benefits of knowledge throughout the East." The day after the fire ceased to smoke Monohur was at the task of casting type from the lumps of the molten metal.

In two months after the first intelligence Fuller was able to send as "feathers of the phoenix" slips of sheets of the Tamil Testament, printed from these types, to the towns and

1815 FEATHERS OF THE PHOENIX-LORD HASTINGS' VISIT.

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churches which had subscribed. Every fortnight a fount was cast; in a month all the native establishment was at work night and day. In six months the whole loss in Oriental types was repaired. The Ramayan version and Sanskrit polyglot dictionary were never resumed. But of the Bible translations and grammars, Carey and his two heroic brethren wrote:-"We found, on making the trial, that the advantages in going over the same ground a second time were so great that they fully counterbalanced the time requisite to be devoted thereto in a second translation." The fire, in truth, the cause of which was never discovered, and insurance against which did not exist in India, had given birth to revised editions.

When, in 1815, the Governor-General, Lord Hastings, his wife, and Bishop Middleton, with the staff, visited Serampore, and for two hours inspected every detail of the mission establishment, declaring that though they had heard much of the latter it far exceeded their expectations, what interested them most was "the room appropriated to the learned natives employed in the translation of the Holy Scriptures; the sight of learned Hindoos from almost every province of India preparing translations of this blessed book for all these countries. When the Afghan pundit was recognised he was immediately pronounced to be a Jew." The Maithili pundit could recite 80,000 lines of Panini's Grammar and some of his commentators. On returning to Barrackpore that great statesman sent Rs.200 to Dr. Carey for the native workmen. He was the first Governor-General to visit a Christian mission, and his immediate predecessor had persecuted it.

CHAPTER XI.

WHAT CAREY DID FOR LITERATURE AND FOR HUMANITY.

The growth of a language-Carey identified with the transition stage of Bengali First printed books-Carey's own works-His influence on indigenous writers-His son's works-Bengal the first heathen country to receive the press-The first Bengali newspaper-The monthly and quarterly Friend of India―The Hindoo revival of the eighteenth century fostered by the East India Company--Carey's three memorials to Government on female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and widow-burningWhat Jonathan Duncan and Col. Walker had done-Wellesley's regulation to prevent the sacrifice of children-Beginning of the agitation against the Suttee crime-Carey's pundits more enlightened than the Company's judges-Humanity triumphs in 1832-Carey's share in Ward's book on the Hindoos-The lawless supernaturalism of Rome and of India-Worship of Jaganath-Regulation identifying Government with Hindooism-The swinging festival-Ghat murders-Burning of lepers -Carey establishes the Leper Hospital in Calcutta-Slavery in India loses its legal status-Cowper, Clarkson, and Carey.

LIKE the growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of all—the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark peoples the possibility of the highest civilisation and the divinest future. In countries like India and China, where civilisation has long ago reached its highest level, and has been declining for want of the salt of a universal Christianity, it is the missionary again who interferes for the highest ends, but