1861. By MAX
MUeLLER, M.A., Fellow of All-Souls College, Oxford; Corresponding
Member of the Imperial Institute of France. London: Longman,
Green, Longman, & Roberts. 1861. 8vo. pp. xii., 399.

The name of Mr. Max Mueller is familiar to American students as that of a
man who, learned in the high German fashion, has the pleasant faculty,
unhappily too rare among Germans, of communicating his erudition in a way
not only comprehensible, but agreeable to the laity. The Teutonic
_Gelehrte_, gallantly devoting a half-century to his pipe and his locative
case, fencing the result of his labors with a bristling hedge of
abbreviations, cross-references, and untranslated citations that take
panglottism for granted as an ordinary incident of human culture, too
hastily assumes a tenacity of life on the part of his reader as great as
his own. All but those with whom the study of language is a specialty pass
him by as Dante does Nimrod, gladly concluding

"Che cosi e a lui ciascun linguaggio,
Come il suo ad altrui, che a nullo e noto."

The brothers Grimm are known to what is called the reading public chiefly
as contributors to the literature of the nursery; and as for Bopp, Pott,
Zeuss, Lassen, Diefenbach, and the rest, men who look upon the curse of
Babel as the luckiest event in human annals, their names and works are
terrors to the uninitiated. They are the giants of these latter days, of
whom all we know is that they now and then snatch up some unhappy friend
of ours and imprison him in their terrible castle of Nongtongpaw, whence,
if he ever escape, he comes back to us emaciated, unintelligible, and with
a passion for roots that would make him an ornament of society among the
Digger Indians.

Yet though in metaphor giants of learning, their office seems practically
rather that of the dwarfs, as gatherers and guardians of treasure useless
to themselves, but with which some luck's-child may enrich himself and his
neighbors. Other analogies between them and the dwarfs, such as their
accomplishing superhuman things and being prematurely subject to the
dryness of old ago, ("_Der Zwerg ist schon im siebenten Jahr ein Greis_,"
says Grimm,) will at once suggest themselves.

Mr. Mueller is one of the agreeable luck's-children who lay these swarthy
miners under contribution for us, understand their mystic sign-language,
and save us the trouble of climbing the mountain and scratching through
the thickets for ourselves.