HIEROGLYPHICS. 317 



times said, that to learn to read it, even in China, occu 

 pies the whole life of a studious Mandarin. Remusat 

 (whose name I cannot mention without recalling one of 

 the most heavy losses which literature has lately sus 

 tained) has established, both by his own experience and 

 by the fact of the excellent scholars he has formed every 

 year by his lectures, that we may learn Chinese like any 

 other language. It is not true, as was once imagined, 

 that the characters are appropriated solely to the expres 

 sion of common ideas ; several pages of the romance of 

 Yu-kiao-li, or the Two Cousins, will suffice to show that 

 the most subtle abstractions, the quintessence of refine 

 ments, are not beyond the range of the Chinese writing. 

 The chief fault of this mode of writing is, that it gives no 

 means of expressing new names. A letter from Canton 

 might have told at Pekin, that on the 14th of June, 1800, 

 a great and memorable battle saved France from great 

 peril ; but it would not have been able to express in these 

 purely hieroglyphic characters that this glorious event 

 took place near the village of Marengo, or that the vic 

 torious general was called Bonaparte. A people among 

 whom the communication of proper names, from one place 

 to another, could only take place by means of special 

 messengers, would be, as we see, only in the first rudi 

 ments of civilization. These preliminary remarks are 

 not useless. The question of priority, which the graphic 

 methods of Egypt have called forth, thus come to be easy 

 to explain and to comprehend. As we proceed, in fact, 

 we find in the hieroglyphics of the ancient people of the 

 Pharaohs, all the artifices of which the Chinese make use 

 at the present day. 



Many passages of Herodotus, of Diodorus Siculus, of 

 Clement of Alexandria, have taught us that the Egyp- 



