s a noble appreciation of Darmesteter by his friend
Gaston Paris. In the 'Sacred Books of the East' will be found an English
rendering of the Avesta by Darmesteter and Mills.

As a thinker in the philosophical sense Darmesteter was remarkable.
Early breaking away from orthodox Judaism, his philological and
historical researches led him to accept the conclusions of destructive
criticism with regard to the Bible; and a disciple of Renan, he became
enrolled among those scholars who see in science the one explanation of
the universe. But possessing, along with his keen analytic powers, a
nature dominantly ethical, he made humanity his idol. His patriotism for
France was intense; and, a Jew always sympathetic to the wonderful
history of his people,--in his later years by a brilliant, poetical,
almost audacious interpretation of the Old Testament,--he found a
solution of the riddle of life in the Hebrew prophets. What he deemed
their essential faith--Judaism stripped of ritual and legend--he
declared to be in harmony with the scientific creed of the present:
belief in the unity of moral law,--the Old Testament Jehovah; and belief
in the eventual triumph of justice upon this earth,--the modern
substitute for the New Testament heaven. This doctrine, which in most
hands would be cold and comfortless enough, he makes vital, engaging,
through the passionate presentation of an eloquent lover of his
fellow-man. In a word, Darmesteter was a Positivist, dowered, like that
other noble Positivist George Eliot, with a nature sensitive to
spiritual issues.

An idyllic passage in Darmesteter's toilful scholar life was his tender
friendship with the gifted English woman, A. Mary F. Robinson. Attracted
by her lovely verse, the intellectual companionship ripened into love,
and for his half-dozen final years he enjoyed her wifely aid and
sympathy in what seems to have been an ideal union. The end, when it
came, was quick and painless. Always of a frail constitution, stunted in
body from childhood, he died in harness, October 19th, 1894, his head
falling forward on his desk as he wrote. The tributes that followed make
plain the enthusiastic admiration James Darmesteter awakened in those
who knew him best. The leading Orientalist of his generation, he added
to the permanent acquisitions of scholarship, and made his impress as
one of the remarkable personalities of France in the late nineteenth
century. In the language of a friend, "a Jew by rac