Carey was, fortunately for posterity, not rebellious in the matter of the portrait; he was passive. As he sat in his room in the college of Fort William, his pen in hand, his Sanskrit Bible before him, and his Brahman pundit at his left hand, the saint and the scholar in the ripeness of his powers at fifty was transferred to the canvas which has since adorned the walls of Regent's Park College. A line engraving of the portrait was published in England the year after at a guinea, and widely purchased, the profit going to the mission. The painter was Home, famous in his day as the artist whom Lord Cornwallis had engaged during the first war with Tipoo to prepare those Select Views in Mysore, the Country of Tipoo Sultaun, from Drawings taken on the Spot, which appeared in 1794.
Of his four sons, Felix, William, Jabez, and Jonathan, Carey's correspondence was most frequent at this period with William, who went forth in 1807 to Dinapoor to begin his independent career as a missionary by the side of Fernandez.
"2nd April 1807.--We have the greatest encouragement to go forward in the work of our Lord Jesus, because we have every reason to conclude that it will be successful at last. It is the cause which God has had in His mind from eternity, the cause for which Christ shed His blood, that for which the Spirit and word of God were given, that which is the subject of many great promises, that for which the saints have been always praying, and which God Himself bears an infinite regard to in His dispensations of Providence and Grace. The success thereof is therefore certain. Be encouraged, therefore, my dear son, to devote yourself entirely to it, and to pursue it as a matter of the very first importance even to your dying day.
"Give my love to Mr. and Mrs. Creighton and to Mr. Ellerton, Mr. Grant, or any other who knows me about Malda, also to our native Brethren."
"CALCUTTA, 29th September 1808.--A ship is just arrived which brings the account that Buonaparte has taken possession of the whole kingdom of Spain, and that the Royal family of that country are in prison at Bayonne. It is likely that Turkey is fallen before now, and what will be the end of these wonders we cannot tell. I see the wrath of God poured out on the nations which have so long persecuted His Gospel, and prevented the spread of His truth. Buonaparte is but the minister of the Divine vengeance, the public executioner now employed to execute the sentence of God upon criminal men. He, however, has no end in view but the gratifying his own ambition."