It is now more than a hundred years since the birth, in 1826, of Edward Byles Cowell, the guru of perhaps the greater number of English Sanskrit scholars. His story is well known. The son of an Ipswich merchant, he was called at 16, by his father's death, to leave school and carry on his father's business. His heart was set on learning. He was already widely read in classics, Statius, Lucian, and Greek romances being added to his school reading, and he was destined, while yet in his 'teens, to publish articles on Rabelais, Longus, and the Persian poets. In 1841, at the age of 15, he had been introduced to Sir W. Jones' works, and in the early morning (called, it was said, by the milkman pulling a string attached to his foot) he had studied in them the Asiaticae Poeseos Commentarii (on Persian and Arabic poetry) and the Persian grammar, working by himself at the extracts from Hafiz and the Shahnamah. Soon, however, help came to him from an old Bombay officer, Major Hockley, whom Professor Cowell cited in 1898, when receiving the gold medal of the Royal Asiatic Society, as a proof of the power which “ enthusiasm and sympathy can always exercise on others, wherever we may be placed ”.