HIEROGLYPHICS. 317 
times said, that to learn to read it, even in China, occu- 
pies the whole life of a studious Mandarin. Rémusat 
(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 hieroglyphies 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- 
