Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/174

found in the strong constructive imagination of the man, in his ability to plan and to organise, in his tireless energy, mental and physical, in a certain largeness of view and quenchless enthusiasm, and withal in an inspiring nobility of spirit. Garnier was born at Saint-Etienne in 1839, but he was brought up at Montpellier within sight of the sea, which early exercised over him a great fascina- tion. He was educated at the naval college at Brest, into which he passed eleventh out of a hundred successful candidates, and from which he in due time entered the regular service after gaining distinction in the examina- tions. It is immediately prior to his maiden voyage as a naval officer that we get the first, and as I think, the most illuminating glimpse of Francis Garnier the man. comes to us from certain boyish letters addressed to a friend, and though his opinions are of a nature little flat- tering to our national self-esteem, they may stand as a picture of a young Frenchman of the best type in early manhood. There are crudities and absurdities in every line. Facts and fictions are accepted at second-hand without enquiry or examination, without test or proof. Passionately patriotic, Garnier is here seen to be the vic- tim of the hate that is ever the fringe of love, and the rank injustice of the verdicts into which it betrays him is too exaggerated to arouse anything save amusement. None the less, Garnier's letters, penned at the age of twenty, are instructive. They show the creed of anglo- phobia in which, it is to be feared, too many young Frenchmen are educated, and though it so chanced that their author in after life won enough of experience where-