Within the memory of man one could in England or America be ’very well educated,’ as the word went, and yet remain grossly ignorant of the simplest elements of the history of language.  In those days Latin was held by scholars to be derived from Greek—­where the Greek came from nobody knew or cared, though it was thought, from Hebrew.  German was a jargon, Provencal a ‘patois,’ and Sanscrit an obsolete tongue, held in reverence by Hindoo savages.  The vast connections of language with history were generally ignored.  Hebrew was assumed, as a matter of course, to have been the primeval language, and it was wicked to doubt it.  Then came Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Forster, Colebrooke, and the other Anglo-Indian scholars, and the world learned what it ought to have learned from the Jesuits, that there was in the East a very ancient language—­Sanscrit—­’of wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, more exquisitely refined than either; bearing to both a strong affinity,’ and stranger still, containing a vast amount of words almost identical with many in all European and many Oriental tongues.  This was an apocalypse of truth to many—­but a source of grief to the orthodox believers that Greek and Latin were either aboriginal languages, or modifications of Hebrew.  Hence the blind, and in some cases untruthful warfare made on the Sanscrit discoveries, as in the case of Dugald Stewart.

’Dugald Stewart was too wise not to see that the conclusions drawn from the facts about Sanscrit were inevitable.  He therefore denied the reality of such a language as Sanscrit altogether, and wrote his famous essay to prove that Sanscrit had been put together, after the model of Greek and Latin, by those arch forgers and liars, the Brahmins, and that the whole of Sanscrit literature was an imposture.’

But it was all of no avail.  In 1808 Frederick Schlegel’s work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, first ’boldly faced the facts and conclusions of Sanscrit scholarship, and became,’ with all its faults, the ‘foundation for the science of language.’  Its great result may be given in one sentence—­it embraced at a glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Northern Europe, and riveted them by the simple name ‘Indo-Germanic.’  Then in this school, begun by English industry and shaped by German genius, came Franz Bopp, with his great comparative grammar of the Indo-Germanic tongues, and the enormous labors of Lassen, Rosen, Burnouf, and W. von Humboldt—­a man to whose incredible ability of every kind, as to his secret diplomatic influence, history has never done justice.  Grimm, and Rask—­the first great Zend scholar—­were among these early explorers, who have been followed by so many scholars, until some knowledge not merely of Greek and Latin, but of the relations of all languages, has become essential to a truly good education.