Scotland and Switzerland, and would deprecate that short-sighted policy which draws a line between the schools supported by public appropriations, and those deriving their income from private patronage, by the exclusion of Latin from the former.

Of the later conquests of the Romans, of their civil wars, their factions, their systems of laws and of religion, satisfactory accounts have reached us; but it is otherwise, when we inquire into the origin, of that discipline: before which, barbarian myriads, and Greek phalanges, alike gave way; of that form of government, so nicely balanced in all its parts; of those wise laws, that still rule, not from their authority, but in virtue of the sound reason on which they are based; of that religion, which retained stronger traces of the primeval tradition, than any other of antiquity, and which, although it ended in the adoption of the deities of all the nations subdued by the Roman legions, seems, in its earliest form, to have deviated but little from the belief of a single and all-powerful God. Such, at least, is the impression we have derived, from an attentive view of the first shape of the religion of the Romans, before it borrowed the elegant fables of Greek poetry, or was debased by the adoption of Phrygian or Egyptian idolatry. The origin of Rome, of its people, its laws, its government, and its religion, are hidden from us in the mazes of a fable. Who is there, that can believe in the divine descent of the Alban kings?-the wolf-fed nurslings, sons of a god and a vestal?-the unrevenged rape of the virgins of a powerful people, by a handful of robbers? not to mention the many palpable absurdities that the less important events carry upon their very face. The origin of nations, is, in truth, rarely to be discovered from their own annals or records. Records are not kept, until a necessity for them has become manifest from experience; annals are not written, until tradition has become so far uncertain, that it cannot be relied upon; oblivion of the best materials, whence annals might be compiled, is the usual precursor of their composition; and the annalist will be compelled to trust to vague recollections, to scanty traditions, or to search inscribed monuments, or written documents, intended as memorials of particular events, or of distinguished persons, but unfit to form a regular series of historic narrative. Rome is not the only important city, the history of whose foundation is fabulous.

It is a weakness to which all mankind are subject, to pride themselves upon an honourable and lofty origin. Even in our republican and democratic country, we find a pride of birth, hanging about the families who can trace an undoubted descent from names celebrated in the annals, or ennobled in the peerages of Europe. And where individual honours no longer attach, states and communities feel the same influence-exult in the endurance and patient fortitude of the pilgrims, or boast the gal

lantry of the younger sons of good houses who founded Virginia; we even recollect the humbler manifestation of the same feeling, in a few families of a race shut out by their physical characteristics, from the higher privileges of freemen, but which could boast that their ancestors had never borne the badge of slavery, but were recruited as soldiers for the wars of Brazil, by princes of the house of Nassau.

In nations where honourable descent confers immunities and privileges, these feelings, founded, no doubt, in instinctive veneration for paternal authority, are rendered more intense by custom and law, but in none are they absolutely wanting. In the absence of positive knowledge, they would lead to invention. Among the more ancient nations, the same principle caused the deification of their founders; and newer colonies, so soon as they began to inquire into their own origin, would scorn to be outdone in the honours of a divine original, and would engraft upon the vague traditions of their real descent, the fables and legends of an older mythology.

This combination of truth with fiction was rendered more easy, from the want of those means by which history is rendered precise. Written language, although a very ancient invention, existed many ages before it was adopted for general use. Even where it was understood and practised, it did not supersede the use of traditions, arranged in that metrical form, by which the ear could be an aid to the memory. Striking figures and images, the interposition of supernatural agency, and the exalt ation of the principal personages beyond the scale of ordinary life, would add to the interest of poetic narrative, and increase the reputation and popularity of the narrator. Hence, in all nations, the earlier histories, whether actually written, or only conveyed by oral communication, are couched in poetic diction. But, in the more early nations, they were never committed to writing. The characters which convey to the sight the impression of sounds, were originally of a form unfit to be rapidly and conveniently traced. Images of physical objects, they required the aid of the arts of design to render them intelligible, and the labour of tracing them would have been considered as wasted upon perishable materials. Various and diverse in their forms for every single sound, they became susceptible of an elegance of expression that would entitle them to a close and laborious study, in order to combine them in the mode best adapted to illustrate the subjects they were applied to commemorate. In their first seat of Egypt, then, we find them applied in the form of sculptures of the greatest elegance, upon materials the most lasting; but the information they convey, bears no proportion in its value to the labour of thought required in their poetic arrangement, or the waste of the means of art lavished upon their delineation.

The discovery of substances upon which the simple labour of conception was capable of conveying the same ideas, as surely as when all the skill of the painter and sculptor was brought into action, on harder and more costly materials, led to the multiplication of written documents. The step to the substitution of a few spirited traces for correct and finished outlines, would be the next in order, and the convenience that was found in conveying by such written documents intelligence of various kinds to distant places, would naturally lead to the substitution of conventional characters bearing a fancied but distant resemblance to the original physical object, and to the restriction of these characters to the smallest possible number. Such no doubt was the source of alphabetic writing. The discoveries of Champollion have traced it to its primitive form in the Hieroglyphics of Egypt; and the link is supplied by the Hebrew alphabet, by which to connect it with the writing of modern Europe. In that alphabet, we still find the letters distinguished by the names of physical objects, whose first articulation is that which is expressed by the letter. The system is identical in principle with that of Egypt, but is applied to a different language. From a dialect cognate to that of the Hebrews, the Phenician, the Greeks derived their letters both in form and in name, but the latter ceased to be significant in the mouths of a nation of wholly distinct origin, and hence in the transfer of the Greek alphabet to the other nations of Europe, while the form remained with no farther modifications than will permit the descent to be distinctly traced, the name ceased to be employed, and settled into the simplest combination of vowels and consonants that will enable the power of the letter to be distinctly articulated. Such at least are the present names of nearly all the letters used by the nations of modern Europe.

Even after writing became thus decidedly alphabetic, the forms of the letters remained such as to prevent them from being used in the rapid manner that they are at present. Nothing would appear more inconvenient to men of business at the present day, than the stiff and formal writing of the Greeks and Romans. Nor was it possible to introduce a more rapid method, until after the invention of printing, when no inconvenience could arise from the use of a rapid and flowing character in manuscript, along with another more precise and distinctly defined for the publication of books. We therefore find that the business character of modern times dates no farther back than the introduction of printing.

Commerce, among the ancients, did not however need the multiplied written records that its vast extension and increased complication demand at the present day. The system of credit was almost unknown, and commercial transactions were limited to

simple and direct barter. If however the good faith of the purchaser was ever relied upon, the rude method of tallies served all the purposes of a memorandum. A plausible writer has lately attempted to account for the diffusion of alphabetic writing, and even to ascribe its invention to the merchants of Phenicia. We cannot however admit that this would have been a natural mode of conveying this valuable discovery. Phenician colonies would indeed carry this art along with them, as well as such others as would be necessary to their existence, and might have communicated them to the surrounding barbarians; but, as in modern times, this, because least obvious in its value, would probably be the last they would have been called upon to impart. Our own country perhaps furnishes the best practical method of judging of the chance of letters being introduced by mere traders among their customers. Two centuries have elapsed since our traders, keeping written accounts, have been in the practice of daily traffic with the Indians, and yet that people has never yet become sensible of the want of such a method of recording the terms of their contracts. So far then from being inclined to acquiesce in the opinion that the necessities of commerce either led to the invention, or caused the diffusion of alphabetic writing, we are fully satisfied that commerce was one of the very last of the arts to which it was applied.

Even when formal histories superseded the poetic rhapsodies that were the earliest form in which traditions were conveyed, the expense of manuscripts, and the scarcity of persons capable of reading them, compelled the authors to publish them, not by the multiplication of copies, but by reciting or reading them to an assembled multitude. In this way the Father of profane history communicated his work to the states of Greece collected for the celebration of the Olympic games.

Before the history of Herodotus becomes authentic, all the annals of the ancient heathen world are involved in darkness and fable, and that part to which credit can be given, reaches to a comparatively short distance from the date at which he wrote. If such be the state of the history of nations, the earliest in civilization, we have far less to expect from the annals of one so late in its admission to the rank of a polished people, as the Roman. But even had the Romans possessed records of their earlier times, we find that one æra of their history was attended by a catastrophe, in which by far the greater part must have perished. We refer to the destruction of the city by the Gauls, in the three hundred and sixty-fourth year after the usually received date of its foundation, and three hundred and ninety years before the Christian æra. By this disaster, the whole accumulated riches of centuries of prosperity perished. Temples, buildings both private and public, monuments of every description, the records of the

nation, and of individuals, the books of the pontiffs, all shared in the general disaster. Of this we have the most abundant evidence, in the confession of the very authors whom we are now accustomed to quote, as the authentic historians of the antecedent times.

The passage in the sixth chapter of the sixth book of Livy, is express in stating that nearly all perished. Such is the unquestioned meaning of the word pleræque, although we have seen an attempt to limit its meaning to "many," or "a large number." The capitol, the only part of Rome that escaped the general devastation, had not been previously the only or even principal receptacle of the public documents, as is evident from the necessity of seeking, after the departure of the Gauls, for treaties and laws.

"Imprimis fœdera ac leges (erant autem ex duodecim tabulæ, et quædum regiæ leges) conquiri quæ compararent jusserunt : alia ex iis edita etiam in vulgus: quæ autem ad sacra pertinebant, a pontificibus maxime, ut religione obstrictos haberent multitudinis animos, suppressa." Tit. Liv. Lib. 6. cap. i.

That documents existed in later times, purporting to be the records of the kings and consuls, prior to the Gallic invasion, is evident from various passages in the ancient writers. But their authenticity is liable to much question, nay, we have direct testimony that they were considered as forgeries.

"A certain writer, however, named Clodius, in his emendations of chronology,* affirms that the ancient archives were destroyed when Rome was sacked by the Gauls; and that those now shown as such,† were forged in favour of those who were anxious to stretch their lineage far back, and deduce it from the most illustrious houses." Plutarch's Numa, in Langhorne's translation.

A stronger proof, that these documents are not genuine, appears in the fact, that, when they are referred to, no notice is taken of the difficulty of understanding them, growing out of the obsoleteness of the language, a difficulty which is most strongly expressed by the author, who gives us the only authentic transcript of the most important of the genuine documents. This record is, indeed, as we shall have occasion to mention, in direct contradiction to the histories of Livy and Dionysius, which could not have been the case had they been drawn from other sources of equal age and authenticity.

In the ancient authors, we find direct evidence of the existence of no more than a very few monuments saved from this general wreck. We shall therefore not fear to weary our readers by giving a list of them, particularly as it may be done very succinctly in the words of Horace.

ελέγχω χρονων in the original.
† ουκ αλέθως συγκεισθαι in the original.