here,
and never dreaming that a fellowship, still less a professorship in
that ancient Tory University, would ever be offered to me.

For me to go to Oxford to get a fellowship or professorship would have
seemed about as absurd as going to Rome to become a Cardinal or a
Pope; and yet in time I was chosen a Fellow of All Souls, and the
first married Fellow of the College, and even a professorship was
offered to me when I least expected it. The fact is, I never thought
of either, and no one was more surprised than myself when I was asked
to act as deputy, and then as full Taylorian Professor; no one could
have mistrusted his eyes more than I did, when one of the Fellows of
All Soul's informed me by letter that it was the intention of the
College to elect me one of its fellows. My ambition had never soared
so high. I was thinking of returning to Leipzig as a _Privat-docent_,
to rise afterwards to an extraordinary and, if all went well, to an
ordinary professorship.

But after these two appointments at Oxford had secured to me what I
thought a fair social and financial position in England, I did not
feel justified in attempting to begin life again in Germany. I had not
asked for a professorship or fellowship. They were offered me, and my
ambition never went beyond securing what was necessary for my
independence. In Germany I was supposed to have become quite wealthy;
in England people knew how small my income really was, and wondered
how I managed to live on it. They did not suppose that I had chiefly
to depend on my pen in order to live as a professor is expected to
live at Oxford. I could not see anything anomalous in a German holding
a professorship in England. There were several cases of the same kind
in Germany. Lassen (1800-1876), our great Sanskrit professor at Bonn,
was a Norwegian by birth, and no one ever thought of his nationality.
What had that to do with his knowledge of Sanskrit? Nor was I ever
treated as an alien or as intruder at Oxford, at least not at that
early time. As to myself, I had now obtained what seemed to me a small
but sufficient income with perfect independence. The quiet life of a
quiet student had been from my earliest days my ideal in life. Even at
school at Dessau, when we boys talked of what we hoped to be, I
remember how my ideal was that of a monk, undisturbed in his
monastery, surrounded by books and by a few friends. The idea that I
should ever rise to be a professor in a university,