tronger and stronger; I had
my own ideas about the mythological as a necessary form of ancient
philosophy, and when I saw that the old philosopher had advertised his
lectures or lecture on mythology, I could not resist, and went to
Berlin in 1844. I must say at once that Professor Bopp, though he was
extremely kind to me, was at that time, if not old--he was only
fifty-three--very infirm. In his lectures he simply read his
_Comparative Grammar_ with a magnifying glass, and added very little
that was new. He lent me some manuscripts which he had copied in Latin
in his younger days, but I could not get much help from him when I
came to really difficult passages. This, I confess, puzzled me at the
time, for I looked on every professor as omniscient. The time comes,
however, when we learn that even at fifty-three a man may have
forgotten certain things, nay, may have let many books and new
discoveries even in his own subject pass by, because he has plenty to
do with his own particular studies. We remember the old story of the
professor who, when charged by a young and rather impertinent student
with not knowing this or that, replied: "Sir, I have forgotten more
than you ever knew." And so it is indeed. Human nature and human
memory are very strong during youth and manhood, but even at fifty
there is with many people a certain decline of mental vigour that
tells chiefly on the memory. Things are not exactly forgotten, but
they do not turn up at the right time. They just leave a certain
knowledge of where the missing information can be found; they leave
also a kind of feeling that the ground is not quite safe and that we
must no longer trust entirely to our memory. In one respect this
feeling is very useful, for instead of writing down anything, trusting
to our memory as we used to do, we feel it necessary to verify many
things which formerly were perfectly clear and certain in our memory
without such reference to books.

I remember being struck with the same thing in the case of Professor
Wilson, the well-known Oxford Professor of Sanskrit. He was kind
enough to read with me, and I certainly was often puzzled, not only by
what he knew, but also by what he had forgotten. I feel now that I
misjudged him, and that his open declaration, "I don't know, let us
look it up," really did him great honour. I still have in my
possession a portion of Panini's Vedic grammar translated by him. I
put by the side of it my own translation, a