Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/481

 OBITUARY.

The Right Hon. F.' MAX MULLER, K.M., LL.D., D.C.L. Born 6th December, 1823; died 28th October, 1900.

By the death in the fulness of years of Professor Friedrich Max Miiller, a notable figure disappears from the ranks of European men of science. A German by birth, he acquired to a remarkable degree the command of a lucid and even captivating English style ; a scholar by profession, he was at the same time a man of the world, and the social influence which he thus secured was utilised in the popularisation of the studies to which his life was devoted. How great and how widespread an interest in Oriental studies, in language and mythology, he excited among his con- temporaries, is shown by the number and variety of honours bestowed on him. He was a D.C.L. of five Universities — Cam- bridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, Bologna, and Buda-Pesth ; one of the selected " foreign " members of three exclusive academies ; and when the Chair of Comparative Philology was established at Oxford, he was designated in the foundation-deed as its first holder. And besides these academic distinctions, he received the star of the Medjidieh, the Swedish order of the Northern Star, the Legion of Honour, the orders of Albrecht the Bear and of the Crown of Italy; while in England, where he was accepted as perhaps no foreigner, save Handel, has ever been accepted, he alone among scholars was for his scholarship admitted to the Privy Council of the Sovereign.

Nor is it too much to claim as one result of his early contribu- tions to the study of Comparative Philology and Comparative Religion, that the foundation of Societies such as our own is largely due to the interest in these subjects which they aroused. It is true that many of the conclusions at which he arrived have failed to stand the test of later criticism ; but this, after all, is the fate of all pioneers of the New Learning. And he pointed out fields which others have since more effectually occupied.