﻿372 THE SEVENTH DISCOURSE : 



proceed to examine the language and letters, religion 

 a "sd philosophy of the present Chinese, and subjoin 

 some remarks on their ancient monuments, on their 

 sciences, and on rheir arts, both liberal and mechani- 

 cal ; but their spoken language not having been preserv- 

 ed by the usual symbols or articulate sounds, must have 

 been for many ages in a continual flux; their letters, 

 jf -ve may so call them, are merely the symbols of ideas; 

 their popular religion was imported from India in an 

 age comparatively modern ; and their philosophy seems 

 yet in so rude a state as hardly to deserve the appella- 

 tion; they have no ancient monuments, from which 

 their origin can be traced even by plausible conjecture; 

 their, sciences are wholly exotic ; and their mechanical 

 arts have notlvng in them characteristic of a particu- 

 lar family ; nothing which any set of men, in a coun- 

 try so highly favoured by nature, might not have 

 discovered and improved. They have indeed both 

 national music and national poetry, and both of them 

 t --atifully pathetic ; but of painting, sculpture, or ar- 

 chitecture, as arts of imagination, they seem (like other 

 Asiatics) to have no idea. Instead, therefore, of en- 

 larging separately on each of those heads, I shall 

 briefly inquire, how far the literature and religious 

 practices of China confirm or oppose the proposition 

 which 1 have advanced. 



The declared and fixed opinion of M.De Guignes, on 

 the subject before us, is nearly connected with that of 

 the Bmhmans : he maintains, that the Chinese were 

 emigrants from Egypt; and the Egyptians, or Ethio- 

 pians (for they were clearly the same people) had indu- 

 bitably a common origin with the old natives of India, 

 as the affinity of their languages and of their institu- 

 tions, both religious and political, fully evince; but 

 th&x. China was peopled a few centuries before our era by 

 a colony from the banks of the Nile, tho' neither Per- 

 . sians nor Arabs, Tartars nor Hindus, ever heard of such 

 an emigration, }s 3 paradox, which the bare authority 



