castes in civil, military, commercial, and religious bands, wherein all acting together, and on terms of equality, those fetters which both concatenate and divide them will be worn thinner and thinner by incessant and unregarded attrition, till at length they fall off of themselves.

But it is by schools, in which children are promiscuously educated, whatever be their rank and parentage, that the prejudices of bigotry and the inveteracy of proscription will be most easily and effectually abolished. A great point has been gained within the last thirty years, when seminaries in which European literature (however humble in form) is taught, were first opened, and are now, in many instances, well frequented by boys of all castes, from the sons of the Brahmin to those of the Soudhra: but a still greater step towards native emancipation was taken by a countrywoman of our own, about twelve years ago, who dared to offer instruction to Hindoo females. Their mothers, through a hundred generations, had been held in the bonds of ignorance, and if their posterity had been left for a hundred generations more under the same thraldom and outlawry, the other sex must have remained, by a judicial fatality, as they are, and as they have been,-unimprovable beings, from the hereditary disqualification of caste, which prevents a man from ever being any thing but what his father was, and requires him to entail the monotonous curse upon all his posterity. But now the worst of castes-the caste of sex, is broken in India, by the opening of schools for girls in various stations. The work has been begun under

good auspices, and it will go on. The great difficulty was to take the first step: this, a few years ago, was deemed an impossibility; the only impossibility now is, to stop the progress of motion once communicated, and never to cease while the earth rolls in its orbit.

But we must return westward.

Literature of the Chaldeans, Babylonians, &c.

Nations have their infancy, as well as the men and women that compose them. To a child every thing is new and wonderful, and if one of these little curious observers could communicate its minute history, for the first three years, in its own exquisite anomaly of words and ideas, there would be the prettiest fairy-tale that the world ever saw; it would, indeed, defy criticism, but it would delight beyond example every body that had once been a baby, dear to a mother, and who remembered, however imperfectly, those joys and sorrows of the nursery that compose the morning dreams of life, before one awakes to its dull, and cold, and sad realities. In like manner, the first records of every people abound with marvels and prodigies, with crude and terrible traditions, wild and beautiful reveries, fabulous representations of facts, or pure unmingled fiction, with which no truth. can amalgamate. Heroes and demigods, giants and genii, evil and good, are the every-day actors of scenes in which supernatural achievements and miraculous changes are the ordinary incidents.

These observations are peculiarly applicable to the

generations to come. His fable has already, by more than a thousand years, survived the empire which it rescued from premature destruction.

The other instance of a small form of words, in which dwells not an immortal only, but a divine spirit, is that prayer which our Saviour taught his disciples. How many millions and millions of times has that prayer been preferred by Christians of all denominations! So wide, indeed, is the sound thereof gone forth, that daily, and almost without intermission, from the ends of the earth, and afar off upon the sea, it is ascending to Heaven like incense and a pure offering; nor needs it the gift of prophecy to foretell, that though "Heaven and earth shall pass away," these words of our blessed Lord "shall not pass away," till every petition in it has been answered -till the kingdom of God shall come, and his will be done in earth as it is in heaven.

We now proceed to the immediate purpose of these papers, to take a brief and necessarily imperfect, but perhaps not altogether uninteresting, retrospect of the history of literature, from the earliest data to the period immediately preceding the revival of letters in modern Europe. I must premise, that the method of handling such an argument in so small a compass, can scarcely be otherwise than discursive and miscellaneous.

The general Forms of Literature.

Literature, as a general name for learning, equally includes the liberal arts, and the useful and abstruse

They could embalm bodies, but hieroglyphics themselves have failed to embalm ideas. Yet there was mind, and mind of high order; limited, indeed, in the range of objects on which it was exercised, but expanding itself into immensity upon the few towards which its energies were converged.

It is manifest, from the uniform character of magnificence stamped upon all the ruins of temples, palaces, and cities, as well as from the more perfect specimens of pyramids, obelisks, and sculptures, yet extant in the land of Nile, that a number comparatively small of master-spirits supplied the ideas which myriads of labourers were perpetually employed to embody, and that the learning of the Egyptians was nearly, if not wholly, confined to the priesthood and the superior classes. Moses, indeed, was instructed in it, not because he was the son of a slave, but because he was the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter. We have Scripture authority, too, for the fact, that long before the Israelites became bondsmen to the Egyptians, the Egyptians had sold themselves and their land to their king for bread during a seven years' famine. However intellectual then the rulers and hierarchy may have been, who planned those amazing monuments of ambition, the hands which wrought such works must have been the hands of slaves,-slaves held in ignorance as well as servitude. Men free and enlightened never could have been made what these evidently were-live tools to hew rocks into squares and curves, and pile the masses one upon another by unimaginable dint of strength, and the consentaneous efforts of multitudes,

whose bones and sinews-whose limbs and lives, were always in requisition to do or to suffer what their hierophants or their sovereigns projected.

Speculation on the Original Use of Hieroglyphics.

The marvellous relics of Memphian grandeur, of which new discoveries are made by every successive traveller into the desert, or up the river, are melancholy proofs that the vaunted learning of the Egyptians, when it existed, was as much locked up from the comprehension of the vulgar, as it is at this day from the curiosity of the learned in undecypherable hieroglyphics. Had instruction been as general there as it is here, the key to those hieroglyphics could hardly have been lost to posterity. But we are told that a key to the hieroglyphics has been found; and in reference to alphabetical hieroglyphics this is true; but that this was the original character of figurewriting, it is difficult to believe; for had it been so, it would probably have been early abandoned, and abandoned altogether, when the simpler forms of lines and curves were adopted to express letters. Had hieroglyphics in the first instance been alphabetical, and employed for purposes of literature, the slowness of the process, and the extent to which documents so written would spread, must have confined their use to tabular and sepulchral inscriptions; for a single copy of the history of Egypt, for example (had such an one been compiled), equal to Hume's History of England, would have required a surface