Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/377

 CHAPTER XXV

GENERAL REFLECTIONS

We can sacrcely express the admiration which we feel for a mind so great and at the same time so healthy and well-pro- portioned, so willingly contracting itself to the humblest duties, so easily expanding itself to the highest, so contended in repose so powerful in action. Every part of this virtuous and blameless life is not hidden from us in modest privacy is a splendid-portion of our national history. Macaulay on John Hampden

THE playground of Eton might have trained up the conqueror of Napoleon ; but it is characteristic either of the circumstances in India or of our college-life or of both, that Mr. Tilak owed absolutely nothing to his alma mater. None of his fellow-students or professors could foretell his future career; none size up the vast potentialities of the man. To most of his fellow-students, Mr. Tilak,— Mr. Blunt, as they preferred to call him — appeared as a young man of rather extra- ordinary abihties but certainly not of extra-ordinary ambition or application, extremely obstinate, somewhat domineering, simple and kind-hearted. Even to Ranade, the most observant man of the time, the memorable ist of January 1880 appeared only to usher in the second stage of our public life. Even he, scarcely reahzed that a dynamic personality had appeared in the stagnant waters of our national life, — a personality