78 ON THE DATE AND ORIGIN 
to the discovery of an art that would Jay bare the nakedness of the 
altar, and expose the depression of its votaries, the hieroglyphic or 
symbolic, fulfilling the double intention of a sacred letter, secrecy 
and discretional interpretation ; and we are justified in our conclu- 
sion by historic testimony, which commemorates Manetho, their 
earliest historian, in the year 260 before the era assigned to Christ. 
The claims of Carthage may be referred to the parent state of 
which she was a colony, and our research from the shores of Africa 
will be directed upon the title of Greece. 
The bays, creeks, and promontories, by which the shores of 
Greece are everywhere indented and protected, and the innumerable 
islands which are spangled over the Aigean waters— 
“ Bacchatamque jugis Naxon, viridemque Donysam 
Olearon, Niveamque Paron, sparsasque per zequor 
Cycladas,”—Aineid, lib. iii. 125.— 
rising on the vision, and offering temptation to the navigation of the 
ancients, at first sight excite the sentiment that here was the cradle 
on which the infant craft of the mariner was rocked into maturity. 
The coasts were divided amongst innumerable independent tribes of 
shepherds or pirates, equally ready to dispossess each other of a set- 
tlement, or to retire from a district to which they were attached 
only by the produce of the soil. The facility of inland and trans- 
marine emigration inspired a character of adventurous enterprize ; 
and the coasts of Greece, of Asia Minor, and of the A2gean Islands, 
are stated to have been peopled with piratical hordes, which struck 
terror into the inhabitants, and levied contributions at discretion ; 
and tradition has decorated the brow of Minos?+ with the laurel 
of having suppressed a custom subversive of social security. 
Some time after this event,*> Agamemnon, king of Argos, con- 
mysteries and of the Etruscan augurs, the dismal seclusion whence issued 
the fatidical ravings of the sibyl :— 
(Ex adyto—Cumza Sibylla, 
Horrendas canit ambages, antroque remugit ; 
Obscuris vera involvens.) 
bear testimony to the exclusive policy of the ancient priesthoods; and the 
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, under the old and new dispensa- 
tions, were carefully concealed from vulgar curiosity till after the Reforma- 
tion of Luther. 
24 Karaordvros 0: rod Miva vaurine TAwmwreon eyevero rag a AAHAdUS, RC— 
Thucydides, 1, 8. 
2° 'The grave sarcasm of Cervantes has afforded us a type of the chivalry 
