nd he openly acknowledged
that mine, with the passages taken from the Veda, was right. There was
no humbug about Wilson. He never posed as a scholar; nay, I remember
his saying to me more than once, "You see, I am not a scholar, I am a
gentleman who likes Sanskrit, and that is all." He certainly did like
Sanskrit, and he knew it better than many a professor, but in his own
way. He had enjoyed the assistance of really learned Pandits, and he
never forgot to record their services. But he had himself cleared the
ground--he had really done original work. In fact, he had done nothing
but original work, and then he was abused for not having always found
at the first trial what others discovered when standing on his
shoulders. Again, he was found fault with for not having had a
classical education. His education was, I believe, medical, but when
once in the Indian Civil Service, he made himself useful in many ways,
educational and otherwise. When he left India he was Master of the
Mint. Such a man might not know Greek and Latin like F. A. von
Schlegel, or any other professor, but he knew his own subject, and it
is simply absurd if classical scholars imagine that anybody can carry
on his Greek and Latin and at the same time make himself a perfect
scholar in Sanskrit. Such a feeling is natural among small
schoolmasters, but it is dying out at last among real scholars. I have
known very good Sanskrit scholars who knew no Greek at all, and very
little Latin. And I have also known Greek scholars who knew no
Sanskrit and yet attempted comparisons between the two. When Lepsius
was made a Member of the Berlin Academy, Lachmann, who ought to have
known better, used to say of him: "He knows many things which nobody
knows, but he also is ignorant of many things which everybody knows."
Such remarks never speak well for the man who makes them.

Another disadvantage from which the aged scholar suffers is that he is
blamed for not having known in his youth what has been discovered in
his old age, and is still violently assailed for opinions he may have
uttered fifty years ago. When quite a young man I wrote, at Baron
Bunsen's request, a long letter on the Turanian Languages. It was
published in 1854, but it still continues to be criticized as if it
had been published last year. Of course, considering the rapid advance
of linguistic studies, a great part of that letter became antiquated
long ago; but at the time of its first appearance it con