ly defended also by no less a man than John Stuart Mill.

This is what I mean by friends and circumstances, and that is the
environment which I wished to describe in my Recollections instead of
always dwelling on what I meant to do myself and what I did myself.
Small and large things work wonderfully together. It was the change
threatening the government of India, and a mighty change it was, that
gave me the chance of publishing the Veda, a very small matter as it
may seem in the eyes of most people, and yet intended to bring about
quite as mighty a change in our views of the ancient people of the
world, particularly of their languages and religions. This, too--the
development of language and religion--seems of importance to some
people who do not care two straws for the East India Company,
particularly if it helps us to learn what we really are ourselves, and
how we came to be what we are.

In one sense biographies and autobiographies are certainly among the
most valuable materials for the historian. Biography, as Heinrich
Simon, not Henri Simon, said, is the best kind of history, and the
life of one man, if laid open before us with all he thought and all he
did, gives us a better insight into the history of his time than any
general account of it can possibly do.

Now it is quite true that the life of a quiet scholar has little to do
with history, except it may be the history of his own branch of study,
which some people consider quite unimportant, while to others it seems
all-important. This is as it ought to be, till the universal historian
finds the right perspective, and assigns to each branch of study and
activity its proper place in the panorama of the progress of mankind
towards its ideals. Even a quiet scholar, if he keeps his eyes open,
may now and then see something that is of importance to the historian.
While I was living in small rooms at Leipzig, or lodging _au
cinquieme_ in the Rue Royale at Paris, or copying manuscripts in a
dark room of the old East India House in Leadenhall Street, I now and
then caught glimpses of the mighty stream of history as it was rushing
by. At Leipzig I saw much of Robert Blum who was afterwards _fusille_
at Vienna by Windischgraetz in defiance of all international law, for
he was a member of the German Diet, then sitting at Frankfurt. From my
windows at Paris I looked over the _Boulevard de la Madeleine_, and
down on the right to the _Chambre des Deputes_, and I saw from m