416 



official successor. " As the generations of leaves, even so are the gene- 

 rations of men." Sooner or later, they all perish in the storm of time. 

 But it is a different thing to have the sear leaves sinking before the 

 autumn winds, and quite another grief to see in midsummer the green 

 leaves unexpectedly broken down, still fresh and full of sap. 



Franz Bopp died in good old age ; he had lived to see the end of his 

 labours accomplished. On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of 

 his first book he found himself surrounded by deputations from all parts 

 of the globe, and academies and monarchs vied with each other to crown 

 him with honours. He left behind him a countless crowd of loving and 

 admiring disciples all over Europe, in India, in America, many of them 

 already themselves in their turn masters, of admiring followers. The 

 little book with which he started in 1816 had expanded into a vast 

 system of comparative grammar. So he died taking with him the con- 

 sciousness of having accomplished his work. 



August Schleicher, on the contrary, it will be seen in the progress 

 of this discourse, though he has done much, was yet called away before 

 the ideal of his youth had been realized, and the aspirations of his man- 

 hood fulfilled. 



Schleicher was born in February or March, 1821 (my informants 

 differ on this point), at Meiningen, a town of Saxony, where his 

 father practised as a physician. Soon, however, the family changed 

 their abode, and came to live at Sonneberg, a neighbouring town. 

 Schleicher was educated at the High School of Coburg, and frequented 

 from 1840-43 the Universities of Tubingen and Bonn, with the 

 avowed intention of studying theology. His chief teachers were first 

 Ewald, the great Orientalist, who instructed him in the Semitic lan- 

 guages, in Persian, and also in Sanskrit. This was atTiibingen. At Bonn, 

 Lassen, the great Indianist, and Eitschl, the eminent Latin scholar, 

 were his chief instructors. All these three men survive their great 

 disciple. It was at Bonn that Schleicher's predilection for linguistical 

 studies became so prominent that he gave up theology altogether for 

 them. He became " privatim docens," i. e. unpaid university teacher, 

 at Bonn in 1846, the subject of his lectures being, as a matter of course, 

 comparative philology. Even before this he had, in 1843, published, 

 at the early age of twenty- two, his first book — namely, the first part of 

 a work, called " Eesearches contributory to the Science of Languages," 

 of which more anon. 



Eortune seems never to have smiled upon him, and he was put to 

 strange shifts to gain his livelihood. At one time he was even forced to 

 write correspondence for newspapers, chiefly I believe to the " Cologne 

 Gazette"— by no means in Germany an easy way of making money. 

 Having spent considerable time in France, Hungary, and Moravia, he 

 returned to Bonn ; but was soon called to Prague, as Professor of Sans- 

 krit and Comparative Grammar. But in the political agitations of those 

 times, he, being a German, speedily became the object of the national 

 animosity of the Bohemians. So it was quite a godsend to him that, in 

 1852, he was enabled to undertake, at the expense of the Yienna Aca- 



