Page:A General Biography of Bengal Celebrities Vol 1.djvu/170

 HIS PARENTAGE AND EARLY EDUCATION. 161 LIFE OF BABU RAM GOPAL GHOSE CHAPTER I. HIS PARENTAGE AND EARLY EDUCATION. Babu Protap Chunder Mozoomdar in his cele- brated biography of the immortal Keshub Chunder Sen, in the introductory chapter, says that before the es- tablishment of the Hindu College in 1 817, a batch of English educated men like Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Sir Raja Radhakant Deb (Dey ?) Bahadoor, and Dew- an Ram Kamal Sen arose whom he calls the first ge- neration of educated Hindus. "The next generation of men" included the illustrious subject of our sketch, and moral men like Babu Ram Tonoo Lahiry, the late lamented Rev. K. M. Banerjea, the late Babu Rusik Kristo Mullick and a host of other equally good men, whose names will appear in the private letters of Babu Ram Gopal Ghose published in an- other chapter. "The late Ram Gopal Ghose," Babu Protap Chunder says, "was perhaps a prominent repre- sentative" of his class, and "retained some trace of the original vigour of the Hindu mind." Babu Ram Gopal and his associates, viz., Babu Ram Tonoo Lahiry, the late Rev. K. M. Banerjea, Babus Rusik Kristo Mullick, Radhanath Sikdar and others were all representative men of the class to which they belonged. In describing the time in which these men lived, Babu Protap Chunder says "that when Keshub Chunder Sen turned out of college in 1858, Hindu Society in Bengal presented a chaos." Now, with all due deference to the opinion of the learned biographer, we are humbly of opinion that this is a statement not quite correct Whatever may have been the social ec- centricities displayed by some thoughtless members of mushroom rich families in Calcutta, the Hindu Society in Bengal, in those halcyon days, was celebrated for 21
 * its deep religiousness, purity, benevolence, and self-