My Father, John Hunter West, was a well known Oriental and Sanskrit
scholar, and his name is still of weight with those who are interested
in such matters. He it was who first after Sir William Jones called
attention to the great value of early Persian literature, and his
translations from the Hafiz and from Ferideddin Atar have earned the
warmest commendations from the Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, of Vienna,
and other distinguished Continental critics.

In the issue of the _Orientalisches_Scienzblatt_ for January, 1861, he
is described as _"Der_beruhmte_und_sehr_gelhernte_Hunter_West_von
Edinburgh"_--a passage which I well remember that he cut out and
stowed away, with a pardonable vanity, among the most revered family
archives.

He had been brought up to be a solicitor, or Writer to the Signet, as it
is termed in Scotland, but his learned hobby absorbed so much of his
time that he had little to devote to the pursuit of his profession.

When his clients were seeking him at his chambers in George Street, he
was buried in the recesses of the Advocates' Library, or poring over
some mouldy manuscript at the Philosophical Institution, with his brain
more exercised over the code which Menu propounded six hundred years
before the birth of Christ than over the knotty problems of Scottish law
in the nineteenth century. Hence it can hardly be wondered at that as
his learning accumulated his practice dissolved, until at the very
moment when he had attained the zenith of his celebrity he had also
reached the nadir of his fortunes.

There being no chair of Sanscrit in any of his native universities, and