Page:Sir Thomas Munro and the British Settlement of the Madras Presidency.djvu/20

12 many of his private letters, a taste which he kept up throughout his life in India, showing himself no mean critic of the current literature of the day. Among the books or authors named by his biographer as his favourites were Anson's Voyages, Plutarch's Lives, Spenser, Shakespeare, Smith's Wealth of Nations, Hume's History, and the Life of Frederick the Great. Accounts of wars and of the tactics of generals afforded him peculiar interest. In order to read Don Quixote in the original when a boy he taught himself Spanish with the help of a dictionary and a grammar. This knowledge soon proved useful, for being the only person known to have a knowledge of the language, he was called on to translate some papers found in a Spanish vessel captured by a privateer belonging to a mercantile house in Glasgow. The reward which he received for this he gave to his mother as his first earnings.

Munro was well fitted by nature for the career he was destined to fill as a soldier and administrator in India. Tall and robust, he excelled in all athletic sports, and was possessed of a high courage, extra-ordinary agility, great presence of mind and powers of self-denial. Munro spent most of his vacations at a country house called Northwoodside, then two or three miles out of Glasgow. This spot was beautifully situated on the banks of the Kelvin, and the days he spent here fishing in the stream, or swimming in Jackson's dam, are often referred to in his correspondence from India.