should
make indices and thus be able to find the place of the passages to
which he alluded. This I did also, but over and over again was I
stopped by some short enigmatical reference to Panini's grammar or
Yaska's glossary, which I could not identify. All these references are
now added to my edition, and those who will look them up in the
originals, will see what kind of work it was which I had to do before
a single line of my edition could be printed. How often was I in
perfect despair, because there was some allusion in Sayana which I
could not make out, and which no other Sanskrit scholar, not even
Burnouf or Wilson, could help me to clear up. It often took me whole
days, nay, weeks, before I saw light. A good deal of the commentary
was easy enough. It was like marching on the high road, when suddenly
there rises a fortress that has to be taken before any further advance
is to be thought of. In the purely mechanical part other men could and
did help me. But whenever any real difficulty arose, I had to face it
by myself, though after a time I gladly acknowledged that here, too,
their advice was often valuable to me. In fact I found, and all my
assistants seemed to have found out the same, that if they were
useful to me, the work they did for me was useful to them, and I am
proud to say that nearly all of them have afterwards risen to great
prominence in Sanskrit scholarship. From time to time I also worked at
interpreting and translating some of the Vedic hymns, though I had
always hoped that this part of the work would be taken up by other
scholars.

Bunsen was also my social sponsor in London, and my first peeps into
English society were at the Prussian Legation. He often invited me to
his breakfast and dinner parties, and when I saw for the first time
the magnificent rooms crowded with ministers, and dukes, and bishops,
and with ladies in their grandest dresses, I was as in a dream, and
felt as if I had been lifted into another world. Men were pointed out
to me such as Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, Van der Weyer,
the Belgian Minister, Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's and author of
the _History of Greece_, Archdeacon Hare, Frederick Maurice, and many
more whom I did not know then, though I came to know several of them
afterwards. Anybody who had anything of his own to produce was welcome
in Bunsen's house, and among the men whom I remember meeting at his
breakfast parties, were Rawlinson, Layard, Hodgson