All this is very strong testimony; and yet of how many people has the same been said, particularly by mourners at the grave of one whom they loved, and who had loved them! Funeral eloquence has its bright, but it also has its very dark side. It is delightful to see how much can be forgotten and forgiven at the grave, how gently all faults can be passed over or accounted for, how none but the noblest motives can then be imputed. But all is spoiled at once if rhetorical exaggeration comes in, so that even the truth contained in the panegyrics is hidden and choked by a rank growth of adulation and untruthfulness. But though I was quite prepared to believe all that we were told about the private as well as public character of Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara, what attracted me most in him was that the same man should through life have been a true philosopher, nay, what men of the world would call a dreamer of dreams; and should yet have proved so excellent a man of business. Plato’s dictum, which has so often been ridiculed, that philosophers are the true rulers of men, has indeed been signally vindicated in Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara’s case. And his philosophy was not what may be called useful philosophy—a knowledge of nature and its laws. This might be tolerated in a Prime Minister, even in Europe. No; it consisted in the most abstruse metaphysics which would turn even the hardened brains of some of our best philosophers perfectly giddy. And yet that very philosophy, so far from unfitting Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara for his arduous work, gave him the proper strength for doing and doing well whatever from day to day his hands found to do. He felt the importance of his official work to the fullest extent, but he always felt that there was something more important still. Though devoting all his powers to this life and its duties, he felt convinced that this life would soon pass away, that there was no true reality in it, that it was Mâyâ, illusion, arising from Avidyâ, nescience, and that there was behind, beneath, and above, another and higher life which alone was worth living. It was his faith in, or his knowledge of, that higher life which best fitted him to perform his work in the turmoil of the world. Thus it was that when any of his schemes ended in failure, disappointment never upset him, and that though he was often deceived in the friends he had trusted, he never became a pessimist.