I certainly had splendid audiences; all the best men of the town were there. But brilliant as my audiences were—they included A. P. Stanley, Fredk. Maurice, Dean Milman, Bishop Thirlwall, Mill, Lady Stanley, even royalty honoured me several times—the old _habitués_ of the Royal Institution were not easy to please. The front row was generally occupied by old men with hearing-trumpets, old Indians, old generals, old clergymen, etc. A number of ladies came in with their newspaper and unfolded it before the lecture began, and seemed to read it with their eyes while their ears were supposed to follow my arguments. One’s self-conceit is sometimes very much tried. After one of my lectures I saw one of the old East Indians led out by his son or nephew, who shouted in a loud voice into his father’s ear, “That was a splendid lecture, was it not?” “Yes,” said the old man in a still louder voice, “very interesting—very; didn’t understand a single word of it.” Such is reputation. On another occasion the same deaf and loud-voiced gentleman was heard to tell his neighbour who I was and what I had done. “Yes,” he shouted, “I know him; he is a clever young man. And we have appointed him to do some work for us, to publish the old Bible of India. We have also made him our examiner for the Civil Service of India. A clever young man, I assure you.” That is how I rose in the estimation of the London world, and how Albemarle Street became crowded with fashionable carriages, and people could hardly find places in order to hear all about Aryan roots and our Aryan ancestors, and our common Aryan home somewhere in Asia. It was in the same Royal Institution that I first raised my voice against the thoughtless extravagances of the so-called Darwinian School, and this at a time when it required more courage to express a doubt on any Darwinian theories than to doubt the descent of all languages from Hebrew. As to Darwin himself, I had expressed my admiration of him in my very first course of lectures, and I had more particularly tried to show how the idea of evolution, or development, or growth, or whatever name we like to use instead of the name of history, had at all times been the guiding principle in the researches of the students of the “Science of Languages.” Our object had always been to discover how languages came to be what they are, to study the origin and growth, or more truly the history of language. If we spoke of the development or evolution of language (_Entwickelung_) it was simply in order to avoid the constant use of the same word. We comparative philologists had, in fact, been talking evolution for more than forty years, as M. Jourdain had been talking prose all his life, without being aware of it (_sans que j’en susse rien_). But we never went into raptures about that blessed word “evolution,” or about the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.