, Latin, and French, or
Sanskrit, Gothic, and German. One of my first lectures at Oxford was
"On the antiquity of modern languages," so that I gave full notice to
the University as to how I meant to treat my subject, and on the whole
the University seems to have been satisfied with my professorial work,
so that when afterwards for very good reasons, whether financial,
theological, or national, I, or rather my friends, failed to secure a
majority in Convocation for a professorship of Sanskrit, the
University actually founded for me a Professorship of Comparative
Philology, an honour of which I had never dreamt, and to secure which
I certainly had never taken any steps.

Here is all my secret. At first, as I said, it required faith, but it
also required for many years a perfect indifference as to worldly
success. And here again in my career as a Sanskrit scholar, mere
circumstances were of great importance. They were circumstances which
I was glad to accept, but which I could never have created myself. It
was surely a mere accident that the Directors of the Old East India
Company voted a large sum of money for printing the six large quartos
of the Rig-veda of about a thousand pages each. It was at the time
when the fate of the Company hung in the balance, and when Bunsen, the
Prussian Minister, made himself _persona grata_ by delivering a speech
at one of the public dinners in the City, setting forth in eloquent
words the undeniable merits of the Old Company and the wonderful work
they had achieved. It was likewise a mere accident that I should have
become known to Bunsen, and that he should have shown me so much
kindness in my literary work. He had himself tried hard to go to India
to discover the Rig-veda, nay, to find out whether there was still
such a thing as the Veda in India. The same Bunsen, His Excellency
Baron Bunsen, the Prussian Minister in London, on his own accord went
afterwards to see the Chairman and the Directors of the East India
Company, and explained to them what the Rig-veda was, and that it
would be a real disgrace if such a work were published in Germany; and
they agreed to vote a sum of money such as they had never voted
before for any literary undertaking. Though after the mutiny nothing
could save them, I had at least the satisfaction of dedicating the
first volume of my edition of the Rig-veda to the Chairman and the
Directors of the much abused East India Company,--much abused though
splendid