y
windows the throne of Louis Philippe carried along by its four legs by
four women on horseback, with Phrygian caps and red scarfs, and I saw
the next morning from the same windows the stretchers carrying the
dead and wounded from the Boulevards to a hospital at the back of my
street. In my small study at the East India House I saw several of the
Directors, Colonel Sykes and others, and heard them discussing the
fate of the East India Company and of the vast empire of India too,
and at the same time the private interests of those who hoped to be
Members of the new India Council, and those who despaired of that
distinction. I was the first to bring the news of the French
Revolution in February to London, and presented a bullet that had
smashed the windows of my room at Paris, to Bunsen, who took it in the
evening to Lord Palmerston. After I had seen the Revolution in Paris
and the flight of the King and the Duchesse d'Orleans, I was in time
to see in London the Chartist Deputation to Parliament, and the
assembled police in Trafalgar Square, when Louis Napoleon served as a
Special Constable, and I heard the Duke of Wellington explain to
Bunsen, that though no soldier was seen in the streets there was
artillery hidden under the bridges, and ready to act if wanted. I
could add more, but I must not anticipate, and after all, to me all
these great events seemed but small compared with a new manuscript of
the Veda sent from India, or a better reading of an obscure passage.
_Diversos diversa iuvant_, and it is fortunate that it should be so.

All these things, I thought, should form part of my Recollections,
and my own little self should disappear as much as possible. Even the
pronoun I should meet the reader but seldom, though in Recollections
it was as impossible to leave it out altogether as it would be to take
away the lens from a photographic camera. Now I believe I have always
been most willing to yield to my friends, and I shall in this matter
also yield to them so far that in the Recollections which follow there
will be more of my inward and outward struggles; but I must on the
whole adhere to my old plan. I could not, if I would, neglect the
environment of my life, and the many friends that advised and helped
me, and enabled me to achieve the little that I may have achieved in
my own line of study.

If my friends had been different from what they were, should I not
have become a different man myself, whether for goo