Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 1.djvu/442

 Subbarayadu kept up his studies even after the B. A. and acquired knowledge in other directions. So far as his arduous official labours permitted, he spared no pains to improve himself. He had a respectable knowledge of English literature. But in the realm of thought and sentiment, he was easily familiar with a Martineau or a Maeter-linck, not with the bookish acquaintance of one who reads and remembers, but with the spirit and affinity of one who studies and assimilates. Equally keen was his intellect on subjects relating to the historic and economic questions of the day. Any one who had occasion to draw him out on these subjects would have surely known how wide his acquaintance was in these directions. More than his talents, what struck any person that had any capacity to see beneath the surface was his superior order of development in the moral realm. It is a truism that greatness in morality lies in the comprehensiveness, so to speak, complexity, of character. It is not in undue development in one direction, be it of honesty or of purity or of veracity, that