OF THE PHONETIC ALPHABET. 85 
splendour of Solomon, the wisest of the chosen kings of Israel, 
and, establishing factories on the northern gulphs of the Red 
Sea, they made themselves masters of the dangerous navigation 
of its sacred shores. The coasts of Arabia, of Persia, of India, and 
Abyssinia, were tributary to their commercial demands ; and trans- 
porting the manufactures and productions of those ancient na- 
tions across the isthmus of Suez to Rhinowlura, they poured them 
forth into the lap of admiring Europe. Impelled by restless 
energy or the abiding desire of wealth, they are said to have 
issued from the Gulph of -Arabia, to have circumnavigated the 
huge peninsula of Africa, and to have returned under the columns of 
Hercules into the Mediterranean waters, the adventurous precursors 
of a remote posterity, who, in the lapse of ages and in the wake of 
their fragile barks, have ravished the riches of the east from the mer- 
chants of the Adriatic and Tuscan seas, and accomplished the fulfil- 
ment of inscrutable wrath against the earliest benefactors of the 
human family. They boldly committed themselves to the wild 
waves, and no less inhospitable savages, of the Euxine; and, daring 
the empire of Neptune, they stemmed the current of Gades, and un- 
furled the unwonted sail on the boundless and unknown Atlantic.— 
Impatient of tried navigations, they explored the harbours of Spain, 
of Gaul, and of Britain; and, first of men, united the extreme east and 
west in the social link of mutual interest. 
To such a people, pressed by necessity and prompted by expediency, 
holding an actual and demanding a logical intercourse with the most 
distant regions of the globe ; eager to invent, and holding the premi- 
um of invention; enlightened in the arts of man, and despising the 
despotism of mythologies, we may patiently, and even cheerfully, with 
probability, and argumentatively, concede the discovery of a phonetic 
alphabet—a medium of discourse between the distant regions and 
ages of mankind. 
From the people who discovered we turn our attention to the period 
of the discovery of that art which, while it enlarges, embellishes the 
human mind; and, in communicating and perpetuating inventions, 
accumulates the conveniences that solace the feeble frame of man. 
Writers have more readily agreed as to the inventors than as to 
the date of the invention. It was not, however, till after the esta- 
blishment of christianity that the question of the date of letters was 
inhabitants.”—See Dr. Keith on the Fulfilment of Prophecy, Chap. VI. p. 327, 
eighth edition, 1832.— Ep. 
