His zeal for seeing that treaty obligations were strictly carried out by the Chinese authorities at times led him into serious trouble, and he received more than one sharp reprimand from the British Minister in Peking on this account, to which, however, he appears to have paid little attention. A fine student of the Chinese language and the customs of these people, he was in many ways a remarkable man, but his outspokenness did not conduce to his popularity with the British merchants he ruled, his colleagues in the Consulgr Service, or his superiors, Nevertheless he was a valuable servant of the British Crown in a foreign land, Apparently altogether serious and without the least spark of the saving grace of humour himself, his letters make extremely amusing reading. Undoubtedly he was a sore trial to those above him and a thorn in the flesh of the Chinese ófücials with whom his duties brought him into contact,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.