s of the British Government in India. The Church of England
constitution of the college at first, to which Buchanan had applied the
English Test Act, and his own modesty, led Carey to accept of his
appointment, which was thus gazetted:--"The Rev. William Carey, teacher
of the Bengali and Sanskrit languages."

The first notice of the new college which we find in Carey's
correspondence is this, in a letter to Sutcliff dated 27th November
1800:--"There is a college erected at Fort William, of which the Rev.
D. Brown is appointed provost, and C. Buchanan classical tutor: all the
Eastern languages are to be taught in it." "All" the languages of India
were to be taught, the vernacular as well as the classical and purely
official. This was a reform not less radical and beneficial in its
far-reaching influence, and not less honourable to the scholarly
foresight of Lord Wellesley, than Lord William Bentinck's new era of
the English language thirty-five years after. The rulers and
administrators of the new empire were to begin their career by a three
years' study of the mother tongue of the people, to whom justice was
administered in a language foreign alike to them and their governors,
and of the Persian language of their foreign Mohammedan conquerors.
That the peoples of India, "every man in his own language," might hear
and read the story of what the one true and living God had done for us
men and our salvation, Carey had nine years before given himself to
acquire Bengali and the Sanskrit of which it is one of a numerous
family of daughters, as the tongues of the Latin nations of Europe and
South America are of the offspring of the speech of Caesar and Cicero.
Now, following the missionary pioneer, as educational, scientific, and
even political progress has ever since done in the India which would
have kept him out, Lord Wellesley decreed that, like the missionary,
the administrator and the military officer shall master the language of
the people. The five great vernaculars of India were accordingly
named, and the greatest of all, the Hindi, which was not scientifically
elaborated till long after, was provided for under the mixed dialect or
lingua franca known as Hindostani.

When Carey and his colleagues were congratulating themselves on a
reform which has already proved as fruitful of results as the first
century of the Renascence of Europe, he little thought, in his modesty,
that he would be recognised as the only man