Page:Bengal Celebrities.djvu/126

 [ "7 ] PRATAP CHANDRA MAZUMDAR. Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, the writer, orator and theologian, belonged to a respectable family of Bengali Vaidyas (physicians) and was distantly related to his great friend and master, Keshab Chundrs Sen. The ancestral seat of the Sens and tha Mazumdars was at Garifa, not very far from Calcutta. But Pratap Chundra was born in his maternal uncle's house at Bansberia, a village 24 miles to the north of Calcutta, in 1840 and lived sixty-five years, Pratap's father seems, from the description given of him in the introduc- tion to Mr. Mazumdar's Heart-Beats, to have been the worthy father of a worthy son though the father was not a very learned man. Pratap |pst his father when he was only nine, and the care of his childhood devolved upon his widowed mother* Mazumdar cherished the ruost tender and vivid memories of his mother, and has given a touching description of her in the introduction already referred to. Having passed through the usual Pathsala and school courses, young Mazumdar entered the Pesidency College. He spent two years there, making good progress in all studies except Mathematics. His deficiency in this branch he attributes to the too frequent promotions with which he was favoured in the school department, and it was perhaps this deficiency that led him to leave college without taking a degree. Henceforth he was left to self- education and to the influence exerted by his friends and compa- nions who were not often of the most desirable character. He was soon thrown, however, by Providence into contact with the two great souls who exerted the greatest influence on his charac- ter. - They were Maharshi Devendranath Tagore and Babu Keshub Chunder Sen, T/be former stood before him "in his character as a finished piece of workmanship, to be admired, loved and, as far as possible, imitated. Keshub was yet unfinished. But he had the