Max Müller occupied most of his leisure moments all through his life in jotting down reminiscences of his early life. In the last years of his life his daughter helped him to piece together these fragments in a manuscript form, though he lamented in the Introduction ‘too late to gather together the fragments he had written at different times!’ The object of his biography was to show what he considered to have been his mission in life, to lay bare the threads that connected all his labours and second to encourage young struggling scholars by letting them see how it had been possible for one of themselves, without fortune, a stranger in a strange land, to arrive at the position to which he attained, without ever sacrificing his independence, or abandoning the unprofitable to which he had determined his whole life.