phonetic signs, first, from the age of Antoninus upwards to that of Alexander; secondly, from that of Alexander to the Persian Conquest; and, lastly, through the different dynasties up to the commencement of the 18th, about the year 1874 before the Christian era*—exemplifying, at every stage of his progress, the accuracy of the royal chronological canon of Manetho, as preserved by Julius Africanus and Josephus, and which the majority of learned men have hitherto treated with undeserved neglect."-No. lxxxix. p. 144.

"Such is a tolerably complete view of the series of interesting discoveries in hieroglyphic literature, recently achieved by the united ingenuity and perseverance of Dr. Young and M. Champollion; with incidental notices of the results which have been obtained in the course of their laborious and successful researches. The

historical importance of these results, independent of their connection with the system of writing, it would, in our opinion, be difficult to exaggerate. The names of the most renowned of the Egyptian princes, Misphrathouthmosis, Thouthmosis, Amenophis, RamesesMaiamoun, Rameses the Great, Sesonchis, &c. have been deciphered from monuments erected during their respective reigns; and, after having been long abandoned as fabulous, have once more been brought within the pale of history. The canon of Manetho, which the learned in their ignorance had so long contemned, has been verified in every point-first, by the general investigations of M. Champollion; and, secondly, by the discovery

of that very remarkable monument, the chronological table of Abydos."-p. 146.

From the gloomy picture of literary delinquency which has been just presented to our view, I gladly turn away to point attention to one alleviating circumstance; and in fairness and candour-from which I trust no unworthy treatment will ever tempt me in the way of retaliation to deviate-I feel myself bound to acquit the reviewer of any design of cooperating with Champollion in the attempt to undermine the historic truth of the Bible, when he concurred with that writer in maintaining the complete accuracy of Manetho's canon. It appears to me but fair to conclude that he must have assented to the correctness of the canon in ignorance of its contents; because, now that he has been better informed, he altogether abandons its defence. But the same

excuse cannot be offered for Chamthat he was ignorant of the extreme it cannot be said for him pollion; discrepance between the accounts of time given by the canon and the Bible, as he alludes to the attempt of some learned men to reconcile those accounts by the supposition of the co-existence of several of Manetho's dynasties, the kings of those dynasties reigning at the same time in different parts of Egypt (which supposition he pronounces to be an absurdity);† and still further, as he alludes to the alarm felt by people at the excessive antiquity which the canon assigns to the Egyptian monarchy-an antiquity which, it seems,

66

But to return to the reviewer-dis. missing the graver charge against him, still what can we say for his consistency? The pendulum or the weathercock now fails to supply an adequate illustration, because other qualities are displayed in the present instance, besides mere wavering or fickleness of mind -qualities which I forbear to specify; it would indeed be quite unnecessary to point them out. Perhaps my assailant will deny that he wrote the first of the two articles containing the passages which I have been comparing. Well! let us suppose he did not; let us give him the benefit of this supposition, and see how his case will stand. I have already noticed the indecency of his declaring a statement to be untrue without the support of a particle of evidence or proof; but what shall we think of him, if it turn out that he made this declaration not only without proof, but against proof against proof of the clearest kind, placed before him in the very book which, in reviewing, he professes to have read with attention-" with more attention than it deserves?" According to this champion's audacious manifesto, Champollion never inferred the truth of the whole canon of Manetho from the assumed truth of part of it; never insisted on the entire certainty of this canon; and the charge I preferred against him under this head is in every respect untrue. Our adventurous critic is so confident of the total and unqualified falsehood of my charge, that he defies me to establish in any one point its validity by evidence. To this defiance I shall reply merely by giving the direct evidence of Champollion himself, as the reader may find it in the 243rd page of my Inquiry, quoted from the second edition of the Précis, pp. 296–7.

"Ce fait capital, que les cartouches renfermant les noms propres des rois de la xviii. dynastie, dont le tableau d' Abydos contient les cartouches prénoms rangés chronologiquement, lus au moyen de mon alphabet hieroglyphique, donnent

exactement des noms propres, que nous retronvons écrits en lettres grecques et dans les dynasties de Manethon, et pour la plupart dans Hérodote et Diodore de Sicile, prouve donc, d'un côté, la certitude entiere de l'histoire égyptienne transmise en grec par ce prétre de Sébennytus, et d'autre part, la haute antiquité des caractères signes de sons ou phonetiques dans le système d'écriture hieroglyphique ou sacrée des anciens Egyptiens."

Now what becomes of the reviewer's assertion of the falsehood of iny charge, and of the ostentatious defiance with which he has accompanied it? We have here the direct evidence of Champollion himself, that he maintained the certain truth of the entire canon of Manetho, which he deduced from the truth of one of its parts. The inference, indeed, is as absurd as the premise is unfounded, but still it is his own; it is not mine, as our critic would have the reader believe. Thus the case of my assailant appears to he very little bettered-and that of the Edinburgh Review is not at all soby the supposition of A being a dif ferent person from B. Upon the monstrous hep of incongruities which the attempt to make me out a calumniator of Champollion, has, under every supposition, involved both A and his employers, it is as needless as it would be disagreeable to dwell. Neither shall I lengthen out this reply by again going over the same ground in refer ence to the second part of A's defiance; his mode of proving my "proficiency in abuse," having been, I conceive, already sufficiently developed. But if the reader should feel any inclination to pursue the subject farther, he will find the charge I brought against Champollion-of his "throwing out hints against the veracity of the Jewish historian in other matters as well as in chronology”—fully sustained with respect to two prominent facts of the Mosaic history, by extracts from the Précis, given in my Inquiry, pp. 119, 120-1-2. The efforts, indeed, of this writer to throw discredit on the facts to which I allude, are not made openly and directly; but still upon a fair examination there cannot remain the slightest doubt of their tendency; and although the reviewer appears to be displeased at my having pointed

out this tendency, yet with all due deference to his superior taste and judgment, I cannot avoid thinking that, by the exposure, I have performed an act of some utility.

The champion of the Edinburgh Review concludes his proof of my having calumniated Champollion by a remark, which is in itself very little worthy of attention, and deserves to be noticed only on account of its supplying an exact sample of the tactics employed by him throughout the entire article. The remark is conveyed in the follow igt rms :

"Dr. Wall's bitterness, however, seems to have originated in a blunder of his own. He has, we think, mistaken the one brother for the other-Champollion le Jeune, who is no more, for ChampollionFigeac, who, we believe, still survives, and is the author of some chronological speculations, printed in one of the letters to the Duke de Blacas, more remarkable for their boldness than solidity. To one so prone to accuse, a glimpse of these speculations, with the name of Champollion prefixed, would be sufficient, without further inquiry, to convict the one brother of the errors or extravagancies, which are solely imputable to the other."

In reply to the very candid suggestion contained in this passage, it is only necessary for me to observe that every one of the charges alluded to as preferred by me against Champollion is grounded on and sustained by extracts from the Précis, the pages from which these extracts are taken being distinctly specified; and still farther the reader is apprized that the references are made to the second edition of the work, published at Paris in the year 1828. The word Précis is not indeed always inserted, as the great numb. r of quotations from it rendered this as unnecessary, as it would have been tedious; but whenever the context does not make it perfectly evident that it is from this book that an extract is given, its name is subjoined, as well as the number of the page in which the quoted passage is to be fouad. How then, the reviewer himself could possibly believe me guilty of the blunder which he has here imputed to me-of charging the author of the Précis with an offence that was not committed by him but by another writer of the same name-I am utterly at a loss to understand. To refute such an imputation and throw back the discredit of it on the source from

which it proceeded, nothing more is necessary than a simple statement of the real facts of the case ; and the same observation may be justly applied to every part of the Philippic which has been directed against my essay.

The example which the reviewer has selected to prove my ignorance and propensity to blunder is put for ward and commented on by him in the following manner :—

"The learned professor of Hebrew having concluded his essay on hieroglyphics, annexes the following notice :—

I subjoin a copy of a paper just put into my hands, which I give as a matter of curiosity connected with the subject, but without vouching for its perfect correctness, as I have not seen the Greek of which it supplies a translation. Should there be many characters common to the hieroglyphic inscriptions [inscription] on the Rosetta stone and on this monument, I am in great hopes that the deciphering of the former record will lead to that of the latter; and that a considerable addition will thus be made to the number of hieroglyphs, whose ideagraphic significations will have been ascertained by pursuing the method I have proposed."

As to the method' here referred to, of ascertaining the ideagraphic significations of hieroglyphs,' we can give no opinion respecting it, because, although we have read Dr. Wall's book with more attention than it deserves, we have not been fortunate enough to discover that he proposes any method for accomplishing the object in question; or that he possesses a single clear and distinct idea on the subject of hieroglyphical interpretation. But, however this may be, it is impossible for any one at all acquainted with Egyptian literature, and the discoveries which have latterly been made in that new field of inquiry, to read the words which we have just quoted, without astonishment at the strange and unaccountable ignorance they manifest upon the part of this censorious professor. The paper' of which he subjoins a copy, and in regard to which he seems to be so much at a loss, contains translations of the three Greek inscriptions on the pedestal of the Egytian obelisk, removed from the island of Phile for Mr. Bankes, under the direction of the late Mr. Belzoni, and now erected at Kingston Hall, Dorsetshire;-the very monument, be it observed, from which M. Champollion, by means of the drawings furnished by Mr. Bankes, was enabled to construct his phonetic alphabet-to correct the values which had been assigned to several cha

racters by Dr. Young, to decipher the hieroglyphical name of Cleopatra fully written in phonetical characters, to detect the Egyptian name of one of the Ptolemies expressed by the same characters which occur in the inscription of Rosetta,—and to publish the numerous readings contained in his Lettre à M. Dacier, which appeared in September, 1822. Of all this, however, Dr. Wall, writing, or at least publishing in the year 1835, appears to be profoundly ignorant. He has evidently not the remotest conception, either of the importance of the monument discovered by Mr. Bankes, or of the interesting results which the industry and ingenuity of M. Champollion

had deduced from it. " Should there be

many characters common to the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the Rosetta stone and on this monument, I am in great hopes (says he) that the deciphering of the former record [the Rosetta pillar] will lead to that of the latter' [the obelisk of Phila];-from which it appears that he is totally unacquainted with the most elementary facts in the history of hieroglyphical discovery. Yet, as if to render his inexplicable inconsistency complete, he appears, from a previous part of his essay, to have had a faint glimpse of the truth. In a note to page 143, he says— In January, 1822, Mr. Bankes sent to Paris a lithographic copy of the hieroglyphs on the obelisk of Philæ; and in the September of that same year came out M. Champollion's letter to M.Dacier, in which he claimed the credit of being the original discoverer of the phonetic use of signs made by the Egyptians.' But he does not seem to be aware, even

here, upon what grounds M. Champol

lion rested his claims, or how his re

searches were promoted by the lithographic copy of the hieroglyphs on the obelisk of Philæe', which Mr. Bankes so liberally transmitted to Paris."

From the whole tenor of this lengthy tirade it is quite plain our erudite critic takes it for granted that, the inscriptions of the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra having been discovered in two cartouches among the hieroglyphs on the obelisk of Phile, the significations of all of those hieroglyphs must be completely ascertained; whereas, in point of fact, no part of the collection has yet been deciphered so as to satisfy any intelligent mind of the correctness of the analysis, with the sole exception of the writing inside the cartouches in question. Here, then, as well as in other instances which have been noticed, may be seen the justness of the

remark already made, that the reviewer in attepting to draw my literary portrait, has in reality been favouring the public with a very exact likeness of himself. The reader of course recallects the finishing touch of the artist's pencil on that portrait: "and in accusing others of ignorance, he is oftentimes pre-eminently successful in exposing his own."

So far the effusions of the reviewer may amuse; but in their main drift they are calculated to make a very different infpression. I shall not, however, attempt to prejudge the case by here advancing any opinion as to the nature of these effusions. I prefer supplying the reader with the requisite materials for forming his own decision on the subject; with which view I beg to call his attention to a simple statement of the course actnally taken by my censor in this instance. In the extract, then, which I have just given from his critique, he has charged me with being profoundly ignorant' of all the facts connected with the discovery of the obelisk of Philæ, and all the phonetic decipherings that were facilitated and promoted by that discovery, facts and decipherings which are fully described in the fourth chapter of my essay, at least as fully as is necessary for enabling a reader previously unacquainted with them, to follow the reasonings and investigatious which are thereon founded, and occupy a considerable portion of the chapter. In direct opposition to the evidence which this part of the book supplies upon the point, he has openly "totally unacquainted with the most and unblushingly accused me of being elementary facts in the history of hieroglyphical discovery"; and—as if utterly reckless of detection, or flattering himself that detection would be prevented by his sinking the character of the work so low as effectually to deter the public from its perusal he has deprived himself of even the lame excuse of having overlooked the chapter in question; since his final quotation from my essay, as given in the above extract, is taken from this chapter-taken actually from a note to one of the very pages in which the external history of the discovery of the monument is detailed.

The following is the paragraph, which, with the annexed portion of its notes, gives the history in question.

"The group which was next analyzed is marked in the same plate as No. 4;