CHRISTIAN LASSEN. 



329 



may be well proportioned to its amount, and although his earlier writ- 

 ings are not wanting in perspicuity, it is reported that his fellow- 

 laborers among his own countrymen find it difficult to understand his 

 later publications. 



CHRISTIAN LASSEN. 



Among the many illustrious scholars who have passed away during 

 the last year, none had achieved a higher or more deserved fame than 

 Christian Lassen, of Bonn. He was a native of Norway, born at 

 Bergen almost with the century, or late in 1800; and he died on the 

 8th of May last. The weakness of age, with a growing infirmity of 

 eyesight, which rendered him during all the last years of his life nearly 

 blind, has withdrawn him for some time from the ranks of the active 

 workers, and given him the aspect of a survivor from a past genera- 

 tion. He belongs, indeed, to the little band of men who inaugurated 

 in Europe the study of India through its own sacred language, the 

 Sanskrit ; and he was the last of them yet left in life. It is striking and 

 strange that there should have died so recently one whose activity as 

 a scholar covered the whole history of a branch of knowledge which 

 lias assumed such importance and prominence, which has yielded such 

 great results, and become an acknowledged necessity to an education 

 in philology. Lassen was led to take up Sanskrit by the influence of 

 A. W. von Schlegel, under whom he first studied at Bonn, becoming 

 afterwards his collaborator, and his successor. The (incomplete) Rama- 

 yana, the Bliagavadgita, and the Hitopade^a, were the works in whose 

 preparation he took more or less part : the two last of these, especially, 

 are still authoritative, unsurpassed in method and merit of execution. 

 In 1827 appeared his first two works: the celebrated Essai sur le 

 Pali, prepared in company with Burnouf, and a geographical and his- 

 torical dissertation on the Penjab, which was the forerunner of his 

 gigantic ladlsche AlterthumsTcunde, the principal labor of his life. 

 This began to appear in 1847, and was broken off" with the fourth 

 volume in 1861—62, by reason of its author's physical infirmities; al- 

 though he was still able to produce a second edition of the first two 

 volumes, rewritten and enlarged, in 1867-74. It was the misfortune 

 of this work, meritorious as it is, that it was begun too soon for the 

 results of the Vedic researches to be brought fully into its early por- 

 tions. The study of India, indeed, was and still is in too inchoate a 

 state to admit of its results being cast into any thing like a permanent 

 form. Apart from those already mentioned, Lassen's principal con- 

 tributions to this department of learning were an edition of the 



