the coffee-house. (In Austria, as in Italy, the coffee-house performs very much the same function as the club.) Nor do they have much to do with the circles of the university or of other higher schools and academies. I speak of those mental labourers of whom Voltaire has said beautifully:
"Les gens de lettres, qui ont rendu le plus de services au petit nombre d'êtres pensants, répandus dans le monde, sont les lettrés isolés, les vrais savants, renfermés dans leur cabinet, qui n'ont ni argumenté sur les bancs de l'université ni dit les choses à moitié dans les académies: et ceux-là ont presque toujours été persécutés."
The persecution of such individuals, which in Voltaire's time was carried on by the church authorities or the minister of the absolute sovereign, has taken a new form in our democratic age: a disastrous disinterest extending over decades or even over an entire lifetime. Remarkably enough, this punishment is seldom passed on mediocre, doubtful, or half-way artists and thinkers, but is aimed with all its vigour at the exceptional individuals only, and at the purest and the highest accomplishments.
Seven years ago, in October, 19135, there died in one of these inconspicuous houses a very inconspicuous individual, Karl Eugen Neumann. He died exactly at fifty, although the fact that it was his birthday was overlooked by himself as by everyone else. He was unquestionably the greatest German Orientalist of his times. His translations of all the canonical writings of Buddhism, and especially of the discourses of Buddha according to the Prakrit text, are complete both as to rhythm and significance; and beyond all doubt they have formed one of the richest cultural acquisitions of our generation. German culture had no equivalent for England and America's Sacred Books of the East, which are an inexhaustible thesaurus of Oriental wisdom. Yet in this one matter of the Buddha discourses—and considering the linguistic significance which this translation, by its fidelity to the spirit and movement of the original, had for the German nation—I feel bound to assert that none of the translations in the imposing array of the Sacred Books has anything near the corresponding significance, mutatis mutandis, for England and America. K. E. Neumann published the individual volumes of his translations over a period of twenty years. He worked constantly, both as a scholar and a poet (or craftsman of
