My Autobiography: A FragmentMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
My Autobiography: A Fragment
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Asianists -- Germany -- Biography; Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900
What impressed me, however, even more than the great hospitality of
Oxford, was the real friendliness shown to an unknown German scholar.
After all, I had done very little as yet, but the kind words which
Bunsen and Dr. Prichard had spoken about me at the meeting of the
British Association, had evidently produced an impression in my favour
far beyond what I deserved. I must have seemed a very strange bird,
such as had never before built his nest at Oxford. I was very young,
but I looked even younger than I was, and my knowledge of the manners
of society, particularly of English society, was really nil. Few
people knew what I was working at. Some had a kind of vague impression
that I had discovered a very old religion, older than the Jewish and
the Christian, which contained the key to many of the mysteries that
had puzzled the ancient, nay, even the modern world. Frequently, when
I was walking through the streets of Oxford, I observed how people
stared at me, and seemed to whisper some information about me.
Tradespeople did not always trust me, though I never owed a penny to
anybody; when I wanted money I could always make it by going on faster
with printing the Rig-veda, for which I received four pounds a sheet.
This seemed to me then a large sum, though many a sheet took me at
first more than a week to get ready, copy, collate, understand, and
finally print. If I was interested in any other subject, my exchequer
suffered accordingly—but I could always retrieve my losses by sitting
up late at night. Poor as I was, I never had any cares about money,
and when I once began to write in English for English journals, I had
really more than I wanted. My first article in the _Edinburgh Review_
appeared in October, 1851.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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