CHAPTER PAGE

I. INTRODUCTORY 1

II. CHILDHOOD AT DESSAU 46

III. SCHOOL-DAYS AT LEIPZIG 97

IV. UNIVERSITY 115

V. PARIS 162

VI. ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND 188

VII. EARLY DAYS AT OXFORD 218

VIII. EARLY FRIENDS AT OXFORD 272

IX. A CONFESSION 308

INDEX 319

LIST OF PORTRAITS

F. MAX MUeLLER, AGED FOUR _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

MY FATHER 46

MY MOTHER 58

F. MAX MUeLLER, AGED FOURTEEN 106

" " AGED TWENTY 156

" " AGED THIRTY 268

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

After the publication of the second volume of my _Auld Lang Syne_,
1899, I had a good deal of correspondence, of public criticism, and of
private communings also with myself, whether I should continue my
biographical records in the form hitherto adopted, or give a more
personal character to my recollections. Some of my friends were
evidently dissatisfied. "The recollections of your friends and the
account of the influence they exercised on you," they said, "are
interesting, no doubt, as far as they go, but we want more. We want to
know the springs, the aspirations, the struggles, the failures, and
achievements of your life. We want to know how you yourself look at
yourself and at your past life and its various incidents." What they
really wanted was, in fact, an autobiography. "No one," as a friend of
mine, not an Irishman, said, "could do that so well as yourself, and
you will never escape a biographer." I confess that did not frighten
me very much. I did not think the danger of a biography very
imminent. Besides, I had already revised two biographies and several
biographical notices even during my lifetime. No sensible man ought to
care about posthumous praise or posthumous blame. Enough for the day
is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries are our right judges, our
peers have to give their votes in the great academies and learned
societies, and if they on the whole are not dissatisfied with the
little we have done, often under far greater difficulties than the
world was aware of, why should we care for the distant future? Who was
a greater giant in phi