Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/130

 106 BENGALI LITERATURE Bristol, and while living there he was baptised and volun- teered to go out to India as an assistant to Carey. He was a man not only of great mental capacity, endowed ৫ with what the Seotch call “along head”, but also had fine administrative ability which kept the missionary community in perfect order. William (078818), va Ward, though inferior in intellec- tual equipment, was a man of great practical ability and sound common-sense. He was born at Derby on October 20, 1769.1. The son of a builder, he had received some education and had been apprenticed to a printer. He rose to the position of the editor of the Derby Mercury and afterwards of a newspaper in Hull. It was at Hull five years before he came out to India, Carey had met Ward and said to him “If the Lord bless us, we shall want a person of your business to enable us to print the Scriptures: I hope you will come after us.” He joined the Chureh in 1796 and came out to India in 1799 at the invitation of Dr. Carey. His work like that of Marshman, from 1800, was connected, if not identified, with that of the Mission at Srirampur. Ward, however, had very little connexion with Bengali literature? except indirectly, much less than Carey and Marshman, to whom, as to no other missionary or foreign writer, the country owes a deep debt of obligation for furthering the cause of education and indirectly of modern Bengali prose. ‘ For more details, see Hist. of Serampore Mission. Also Samuel Stennett, Memoirs of the Life of William Ward (1825); Bengal Obituary, pp. 343-45; Dict. of National Biogr.: Memoir of Ward, Philadelphia ; Simpson’s Life prefixed to Ward on Hindus ; W. H. Carey, Orient. Christ. Biograph. vol. ii, pp. 1-6 et. seq. ? Ward, says Carey, could speak Bengali a little (EB. Carey, op. cit, p. 424), Ward, however, wrote some tracts in Bengali which will be noticed hereafter.