Letter of Statement for Applying Job
by James Muray in 1867 for a position with the British Museum.
(Taken from "The Professor and The Madman")

I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and that I possess a general acquintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes--not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I posses that general lexical and structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a mater of a little application. With several I have more intimate acquintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal and various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, Germand, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engage with sclavonic, having obtained useful knowledge of the Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purpose of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at the sight of Old Testament and Peshito, to a less degreee I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it was left by Genesius.

NB: He wrote it in his thirtieth birthday, and he was turned down by the British Museum. Nevertheless, it was one of the best letter of statement. Later, he was the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is generally regarded as the most comprehensive and scholarly dictionary of the English language (taken from wikipedia).