on their former visit to Egypt. Judah says to Joseph :

--

"My Lord asked his servants, saying,- Have ye a father or a brother? And we said unto my Lord, -We have a father, an old man and a child of his old age, a little one; and his brother is dead, and he alone is left of his mother, and his father loveth him."

Is not this the voice of nature speaking with human lips, and speaking to all the affections that make life

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a father" a little one" "whose

"he left alone of his mother,

I

and his father loveth him." Love, in man at least, can go no further, in woman perhaps it may. Now, as Judah must be supposed to have prepared his appeal for this interview, the speech itself may be considered as the earliest specimen of eloquence; and surely, in its kind, it has never been surpassed. have dwelt the more on this specimen, because it is the model of almost every other regular speech that can be found in the Sacred Scriptures. In these, recapitulatory narrative brings home to the hearers the peculiar deduction which the speaker would establish; having, as it were, by lines of circumvallation, completely secured access to every point of attack at once, he carries by storm at last the object of his harangue. The whole book of Deuteronomy furnishes a series of such historical arguments; Moses therein addressing, as with the living voice, the people whom he had brought out of Egypt, and led during forty years in the wilderness. And these consecutive

discourses were probably so delivered to the tribes bodily assembled from time to time, to receive instruction from the lips of a legislator, who could call the heavens and the earth to be his auditors, and say with authority, "My doctrine shall drop as the rain; my speech shall distil as the dew; as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass."

Joshua's exhortation to the elders before his death; Samuel's remonstrance with the Israelites for their perverseness in demanding a king; Solomon's speech to the people before the dedication of the temple; Daniel's confession of the sins of the captives in Babylon, and their forefathers; Ezra's prayer after the return of the Jews to their own land, laid desolate; and, in the New Testament, Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost; Stephen's discourse before the Sanhedrim; and Paul's two defences before the council, and before Agrippa:-These are all of the same class of oratory, in which the details are long, the arguments brief, and the conclusion personal; so that this peculiar mode of eloquence may be traced for two thousand years; and probably, from its plainness and energy of application, was usual among all the eastern people.

But whatever may be conjectured concerning artificial prose before the invention of writing, it is certain that verse existed from the infancy of the world, and was employed for history, laws, chronology, devotion, oracles, love, war, fables, proverbs, and prophecy, indeed, for every combination of thoughts, which were intended to be long and well remembered.

Invention of Letters.

Having now arrived at that period, where sacred and profane history meet, the former, like a clear stream issuing from a known fountain, and defined along its whole course through a peopled and cultivated region; the latter, dimly and slowly disentangling its mazes from the shades of impenetrable forests,

"Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,”BYRON.

but henceforward widening, deepening, brightening on its way, the first subject that claims our attention is the learning of the Egyptians, of which much has been said and little is known. The testimony, however, of all antiquity, as well as the superb and stupendous monuments of architecture, and traces of literature in the shape of hieroglyphics and symbols, however unintelligible, prove that they were a wonderful people for gigantic enterprise and indefatigable industry, in achieving what were then the highest feats of manual, intellectual, and mechanic power. On these we shall not expatiate here, as another opportunity will be afforded in the next paper of this series, of considering by whom, and by what means, such marvellous works were executed. At present we shall only allude to them generally, in connection with the discovery of alphabetical writing. When, where, and by whom, letters were invented, it is now in vain to imagine. Notwithstanding the pretensions of Hermes Trismegistos, Memnon, Cadmus, and

others, the true history, nay even the personal existence of these supposed claimants, must be ascertained before the unappropriated honour can be conceded to any one of them. It may, meanwhile, be affirmed, as one of those circumstances humbling to human pride that occasionally occur in history, and which, while they strangely stir the imagination, awaken sublime but melancholy reflection in minds given to muse upon the vanity and mortality of all the things that are done under the sun,-it may be affirmed, as one of these humbling circumstances, that the man who conquered the greatest trophy ever won from fate and oblivion, lost his own name, after divulging the secret by which others might immortalise theirs. As a figure of speech, one may be allowed to wish that the first letters in which he wrote that name, whether with a pen of iron on granite, or with his finger in sand, had remained indelible. But his own invention is his monument, which, like the undated and uninscribed pyramid, will remain a wonder and a riddle to the end of the world.

It is allowed, I believe, on all hands, that the Egyptians, from time whereof the memory of man knoweth not to the contrary, possessed three kinds of writing, — hieroglyphical, alphabetical, and, probably, as a link between, logographic, of which latter the Chinese is the only surviving example at this day. Indeed, in all countries where society has emerged from the stagnation of barbarism, and has made but little advance towards civilisation, there have been found evidences of attempts to create a language for the eye, either by figures of things, by arbitrary

symbols of words, or, in the most perfect manner, by the systematic combination of lines forming letters to represent the rudiments of sounds. This assertion might be copiously illustrated, but the limits of the present Essay will permit no more than a cursory mention of the fact.

It has been observed that the Egyptians were in possession of three kinds of letters, if, indeed, by letters, three kinds of learning be not typified; for Pythagoras, it is said, as a special favour rarely granted to a stranger, was initiated into these triple mysteries of writing. The hieroglyphic mode was unquestionably the first; but between it and the literal, the affinity is so remote, that the leap over the whole space could scarcely have been taken at once, especially as there is an intervening step so obviously connected with each, and connecting them with one another, that it seems almost necessary for invention to have rested, at least for a little while, upon it. When the ambiguity and imperfection of hieroglyphics were felt to be irremediable, the first practical scheme which would suggest itself to the mind, which conceived the happy idea of designating vocal sounds by strokes, in themselves without meaning would be to invent a separate mark for every word; but, as all the easy forms would soon be exhausted, it might next occur to make these elementary, and adapt them, not to individual words, but to the most common simple sounds of which words were composed. Thus monosyllables would have a single mark; dissyllables two joined together; and polysyl