OF THE PHONETIC ALPHABET. 73 
which to the expression of time, place, and abstract notions, reduces 
it to the dilemma of historical painting, and, like it, subject to the 
fanciful interpretation of the reader. We shall dismiss, therefore, 
this kind of letters, by observing that it is more than probable that 
to this species of letter the very early allusions to book-making!2 
have reference. That it was the symbolic writing in which the 
priests of Egypt embodied their sacred mythologies, we have the 
best testimony the subject admits ; and there may be no impiety in 
supposing that it was adopted? under the “divine legation of 
Moses.”*+ ‘The singleness of interpretation might be preserved invio- 
late in the sacred college of the tabernacle, where the subject was 
one and immutable, while the ever-varying themes of active life 
would demand a less equivocal medium of communication. 
We arrive, then, at that particular variety of letter to which this 
paper is devoted, which fulfils every intention of the inventor, and 
which has been embraced by nearly all the nations of the earth; it 
is based on an accurate knowledge of the connection of the two mas- 
ter senses'® of the animal machine, and a just estimate of the opera- 
tions of the brain ; it has imitated and extended, by a nice observa- 
12 It would be unreasonable to suppose that even symbolic writing could 
have existed without materials on which to employ it. Those best suited to 
a phonetic alphabet had no doubt been invented by the priests of Egypt for 
the reception of the symbolic writing, long anterior to the discovery of the 
former kind of letter. Stones, bricks, leaves, and bark of trees, plates of lead, 
wood, wax, and ivory, might have received the mysterious characters of the 
hierarchy at a very early period, and suggested a sort of book-making that 
would facilitate the completion and communication of the more useful disco- 
very. The works of Hesiod, after the discovery of the phonetic alphabet, 
are said to have been inscribed in tablets of Jead in the Temple of the Muses 
in Beeotia; and the laws of Solon to have been written on tablets of wood 
(though most probably for the convenience of the public, as that lawgiver 
died only 558 z.c.) in all probability after the discovery of Papyrus. 
18 Some divines have stoutly maintained that letters were coeval with, 
and even anterior to, Noah, but such an opinion proceeds neither of the 
schools nor of the sanctuary ; and that great astronomer, Sir Isaac Newton, 
when he ventures an assertion that they were known for several generations 
in the family of Abraham, must have intended the pictorial and not the pho- 
netic letter. The land of Ur, 1x fire (of the Chaldees), the native place of 
that patriarch, had in all probability, been early acquainted with an art which 
symbolized (“the afterwards forbidden thing”) the god of fire, or the great 
luminary of the visible creation, to the fathers of the chosen seed. 
14 “The author of the Questions and Answers ab Orthodoxos tells us, and 
that, therefore, Moses was as well instructed in this hieroglyphic learning of 
theirs (the Egyptians) as in their mathematics.”—Cudworth, cap. iv. xviii. 
1© The eye and the ear. 
VOL. IX., NO. XXV. 10 
