Charles Rockwell Lanman, American Sanskritist, to Professor Max Müller, German Orientalist: a handwritten postcard, sent from Harvard to Oxford in 1896.

United States of America two cents postcard, 90 x 140 mm, recto addressed Professor Fr. Max Müller, K.M., etc. etc., University of Oxford, England, with an Oxford arrival postmark of July 4 1896, and re-directed address of Spitalhaugh, West Linton, S. B. [i.e. Scottish Borders]; verso imprinted ‘C. R. Lanman, 9 Farrar Street, Cambridge, Mass. / Harvard University’, and with an autograph message in Lanman’s hand dated June 14 1896, which is addressed ‘Dear Professor Max Müller’; Lanman explains he is sending Müller a copy of the Jātakamālā [trans. Hendrik Kern, Harvard Oriental Series, 1891] and ‘if it proves to be a duplicate, perhaps you can pass it along to one of the college libraries or some students’; he also mentions that Gale(?) has sent another Sanskrit work and [Henry Clarke] ‘Warren has just sent you his Buddhism. He has read his Pali faithfully. Of Whitney’s Atharva Veda, the pièce de résistance is the text criticism‘. Lanman closes with: ‘I hope your heart is firm and that I may have the pleasure once more of meeting you at Paris next year. Respectfully, C. R. L.’; the verso has two small residual hinge marks from where the postcard was once tipped onto an album page, but is otherwise in excellent condition.

A previously unpublished item of correspondence between the renowned American Sanskrit scholar Charles Rockwell Lanman (1850-1941), head of Indo-Iranian Languages at Harvard University, and the brilliant and influential German Orientalist Max Müller (1823-1900), Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford.