been suffered to become obsolete, that M. de Guignes was able, in his day, to collect and put into his dictionary eight thousand characters: the six national dictionaries that were chiefly in use about a century since, give from fifteen to about thirty thousand; and, lastly, the Imperial Chinese Dictionary, composed by order of the emperor Kang-khee, in 1710 of our own era, comprises not less than forty-three thousand four hundred and ninety-six characters! Dr. Marshman, in his valuable "Elements of Chinese Grammar," observes, that in the Imperial Dictionary these stand arranged as follows: Characters in the body of the work Added, principally obsolete and incorrect forms of others We have here, therefore, a confession by the Chinese lexicographers themselves, that upwards of ten thousand of the characters admitted into the Imperial Dictionary, being nearly a fourth of the whole, are useless, and for the most part unintelligible, in the present day; independently of which,“ a considerable number," observes Dr. Marshman, "of the 31,214 characters adopted from the former dictionaries have no meaning affixed to them; but are merely given as obsolete, or current but incorrect forms of other characters, to which the compilers of the dictionary have referred the reader for their meaning." Whence we may fairly conclude, that of the characters which are still allowed to figure away in the written language of China, nearly half of the whole convey no ideas whatever, and are altogether representatives without constituents. Were we able to follow even the latest of these up to their origin, and to prove that they have not issued, in the remotest manner, from the two hundred and fourteen elementary marks, which Dr. Marshman has endeavoured to do, III. INDICANTS, or POINTERS: from their indicating or pointing out the relative form or position of what is predicated: as, IV. ANTITHETICS, or CONTRARIES: formed by inverting or reversing the character; and hence requir ing an antithetic or correspondent signification: as, Modern Forms. Dead Body, A and p Most of the Chinese characters may be classed under one of these four heads. The two remaining classes do not appear to be so intimately connected with a pictorial origin. The two hundred and fourteen elementary keys, or radicals of the language, are divided into seventeen classes, according to the number of strokes of which each element or radical consists. It is probable, however, that all the more complicated, and, indeed, great numbers of all those that possess more than five or six strokes, are as strictly compounds as any in the language, though the lexicographers are incapable of reducing them to their constituent principles; and heuce allow them to stand as primitives among such as are of simpler construction; and hence the total number of primitives are reckoned at about sixteen hundred, each of them producing from three to seventy-four derivatives; and hereby constituting the great mass of the Chinese written language. *Elements of Chinese Grammar, with a preliminary Dissertation on the Characters and Colloquial Meium of the Chinese, &c. By J. Marshman, D.D., Serampore, 1814, 4to. we should probably still find them derived in the same manner from forms or symbols of things, and that they were at first direct imitations or conven. tional representatives; still, as I have already shown, united and compounded, or in some other way modified to express abstract or complicated ideas. It must be obvious, however, that characters thus constituted must be very loose and perplexing; and such, in fact, they are often found to be, by the most expert and best instructed natives. It must be obvious, at the same time, that a system of picture-writing, thus constructed and perfected, may, in a considerable degree, answer the purpose of alphabetic marks;* and it is doubtless owing alone to the perfection which this system of writing had acquired in Mexico, and still exhibits in China, that the ingenious people of both countries stopped so long at the point of abbreviated emblems, significant of objects, and never fairly advanced from a legible language for things, to a legible language for words. It should be observed, however, as a farther proof of the tendency of picture-characters to advance towards literal, that even in China itself the Mantcheu, or Tartars, have an alphabet, or system of verbal writing, and that the Mantcheu practice has long been acquiring a growing reputation. It should be observed, also, that the Chinese characters themselves have of late been resorted to at Canton, and by Chinese natives, as merely expressive of sounds, and been employed in the formation of an English vocabulary; in consequence, as Sir George Staunton remarks, of the great concourse of persons residing at this station who use the English language. In like manner, the Japanese, fond as they are of copying from the Chinese, have long since departed from their system of marks for things, and addicted themselves to alphabetic characters; sometimes writing them horizontally, and sometimes perpendi Among the numerous and important library establishments of the present day, one has lately been opened by the co-operation of a committee of enlightened and public-spirited individuals, for a regular course of instruction by lectures in many of the most extensively spoken languages of the East, and among the rest in Chinese. The President is Lord Bexley; among the Vice-Presidents are Sir George Staunton, Bart., and Sir T. S. Raffles; its situation is in Bartlett's Buildings, Holborn; and while instruction in these valuable branches of literature is hereby offered to every one, it is gratuitously bestowed on all Christian missionaries who are desirous of taking advantage of its benefits. It is, hence, emphatically denominated, 8" LANGUAGE INSTITUTION IN AID OF THE PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIANITY," and few establishments of the present day are more entitled to the support of the nation, or of the world. It should be farther stated, moreover, in order to excite the fullest confidence of the public, that the Professor in the Chinese department is the Rev. Dr. Morrison; while those in the Arabic, Persian, Bengalee, and Sanserit are nearly of equal celebrity, and have the occasional assistance of Professor Lee, of Cambridge; and that all of them have entered into the undertaking with so much zeal and public spirit as to afford their valuable assistance gratuitously. Nor has this instruction been offered in vain or unsuccessfully. Even in the Chinese department, where many might expect least to be accomplished, the very learned and excellent Professor, in his first Quarterly Report to the Committee, March 1, 1826, has stated, that he has been attended by thirteen students, seniors and juniors, besides several ladies; with the progress of most of whom he has had great reason to be satisfied: and two or three of whom, having attained some previous knowledge of the language, are preparing to carry on the design after his own return to China. The Institution is also under a deep and inexpressible obligation to Dr. Morrison, for the gratuitous use of his most valuable Chinese library,-by far the first in Europe,-and, perhaps, any where out of Asia; which is now deposited and arranged at the establishment. As a matter of high literary curiosity, I have requested its distinguished owner to furnish me with a brief account of the library for insertion in the present place, and my reverend friend has been kind enough to comply by the following communication, which I give in his own words: "In the LANGUage Institution there is deposited an extensive library of Chinese printed books and MSS., together with a museum intended to illustrate subjects referred to in the books. This Library and Museum are the property of Dr. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China. "There are between nine hundred and a thousand works; making in all about 10,000 volumes, stitched and bound in the Chinese manner. "These books contain specimens of the literature of more than three thousand years; from the compilations and original writings of Confucius, five hundred years before the Christian era down to the pre sent time. "The materials from which Confucius compiled the works he put forth are not extant in any other form than that which he gave them; and therefore, he may be regarded as the oldest Chinese writer whose works have come down to the present day. "Dr. Morrison has not had time, during his sojourn in Europe, to make out a Catalogue Raisonné of his Chinese library, with a brief account of the chief works, their titles, subjects, authors, date, &c. "They consist of the sacred books of Chinese antiquity, with copious commentaries, written at varions periods, and by a great variety of persons; history, ancient and modern; geography, and topography; astronomy; biography: opinions on government; rites and usages of China; religious books of Laoukeu nism, Budhism; and the morals of Confucianism; poetry; historical and other novels; medicine; botany; and the materia medica; notices of foreign nations, and embassies to China; works composed by Jesuit missionaries concerning Europe and Christianity; the European geometry; and the astronomy of the fifteenth century, &c.; a few works on the religion of Mahomet, &c. &c." ↑ Embassy, ii. 576; Hager's Chinese Elements, p. lxi. 288 ON LEGIBLE LANGUAGE, IMITATIVE AND SYMBOLICAL. can be no doubt, that, in whatever part of this quarter of the globe the system of alphabetic characters originated, they were readily and rapidly introduced into every other part. Abraham might, hence, have learned them in Chaldea, or in Canaan, and communicated them wherever he sojourned; as Ishmael, probably, communicated them shortly afterward to Arabia, upon his exile from his father's house. The proper Phoenician alphabet seems to have consisted of not more than thirteen letters at first; it afterward had three added to it, making sixteen in the whole, and in this number it seems to have been earliest employed by many of the adjoining countries, and is distinguished by the name of the Samaritan, or ancient Hebrew, the terms and characters being nearly the same as the Phoenician. The Chaldeans introduced some kind of change into the form of the letters, made them more elegant, and added six other letters, since the Samaritan alphabet did not seem sufficiently full to express all the articulations of their speech. And in this manner, with various changes and augmentations, the Phoenician alphabet can be traced throughout every part of ancient and modern Europe; every region of Africa, where writing of any kind is current, and the western countries of Asia. Over a very extensive portion of this last continent, however, we meet with an alphabet that has no common origin or conformity of principle with any hitherto described. This is the Nagari, or Deva-nagari, as it is called by way of pre-eminence. I consists of not less than fifty letters, of which sixteen are vowels and thirty-four consonants, all arranged in the order of the alphabet, with a systematic precision that is to be found nowhere else. The vowels take the lead, beginning with those most easily uttered, and terminating with those which approach towards the consonant sound. The consonants then follow in five regular series of gutturals, compounds, palatines, dentals, and labials: the whole closing with letters expressive of sounds that do not exactly enter into any of the preceding series, and which may be regarded as forming a general appendix. This alphabet is asserted by many learned Bramins to be of a higher antiquity than any other; and there can be no doubt that it has a just claim to a very remote date. But its very perfection is a sufficient confutation of its having been invented first of all : something far more rude and incondite must have preceded and paved the way for it; and in the complex characters of which it consists, we seem to have the relics of that emblematic or picture-language, which I have thus endeavoured to prove has laid a foundation for alphabetic writing in every part of the world. With a few trifling variations, this correct and elegant alphabet extends from the Persian Gulf to China; but it has no pretensions to rival the antiquity of the Phoenician. It is unborrowed, but of later origin. Such is a brief history of the noblest art that has ever been invented by the unassisted efforts of human understanding; an art that gives stability to thought, forms a cabinet for our ideas, and presents, in imperishable colours, a speaking portraiture of the soul. Without this, hard indeed would be the separation of friends; and the traveller would become an exile from his native home,-vainly languishing for the consolatory information that his wife, his children, his kinsmen, his country, were in a state of health and prosperity, and himself still embalmed in their affections. Without this, what to us would be the wisdom of past ages, or the history of former states? The chain of nature would be broken through all its links, and every generation become an isolated and individual world, equally cut off, as by an irremeable abyss, from its ancestors and from posterity. While the language of the lips is fleeting as the breath itself, and confined to a single spot as well as to a single moment, the language of the pen enjoys, in many instances, an_adamantine existence, and will only perish amid the ruins of the globe. Before its mighty touch time and space become annihilated; it joins epoch to epoch, and pole to pole; it gives unity to the works of creation and Providence, and enables us to trace from the beginning of things to the end. It is the great sun of the moral world, that warms, and stimulates, and vivifies, and irradiates, and developes, and matures the best virtues of the heart, and the best 289 ON THE LITERARY EDUCATION OF FORMER TIMES. faculties of the intellect. But for this, every thing would be doubt, and darkness, and death-shade; all knowledge would be traditionary, and all experience local; civilized life would relapse into barbarism, and man would have to run through his little, and comparatively insignificant round of existence, the perpetual sport of ignorance and error, uninstructed by science, unregu lated by laws, and unconsoled by Revelation. Have I not, then, justly characterized it as the noblest art that has ever been invented by the unassisted efforts of human understanding? ON LECTURE XI. THE LITERARY EDUCATION OF FORMER TIMES; AND ESPECIALLY THAT OF GREECE AND ROME. We have taken a brief survey of the nature of oral language, and of the means devised in different ages and parts of the world to render the transi tory ideas it communicates permanent, by means of picturesque or symbolical signs; so that what is once spoken may conveniently be copied or written down, and treasured up for future ages. It yet remains for us to take some notice of the chief methods, that have been adopted in different eras, to turn this accumulating treasure or bank of intellectual knowledge to the best account; or, in other words, to develope the mode of education adopted among those nations that have been most celebrated for literary and scientific acquirements, especially in Greece and Rome; and to compare them with the means possessed in our own day, and the general and laudable desire of improvement manifested in every quarter, and prospective of no small addition to the best sort of wealth and prosperity with which a nation can ever be enriched. We have already traced whatever degree of art or science may have descended from the antediluvian to the postdiluvian race, through the narrow link of human beings preserved in the ark, or whatever the earliest generations of the postdiluvians may have been able to strike out for themselves, to the plains of Babylon as their centre; and observed that, in their radiations from this central point, they have been peculiarly influenced by the political character of the people who cultivated them, and that of the country and the climate in which they took up their abode. When, in the prosecution of the present subject, we shall come hereafter to examine more particularly into the furniture and faculties with which the mind is endowed, we shall have to show that its chief trains, as well of feelings as of ideas, of passions, and rational pursuits, have derived a strong tinge from these circumstances. Of the birth or first growth of the Grecian states we know little or nothing, though we are made acquainted with the region from which they sprang. The exquisite beauty of the country in which they had the good fortune to fix themselves; its rich and picturesque variety of hill and dale, the spontaneous fertility of its soil, the sweetness of its temperature, the almost unbroken serenity of its skies, and the smooth and glassy sea that surrounded and deeply indented its coasts, harmonized all the ruder passions, and called forth the noblest and finest feelings of the soul. They soon became enamoured of the graceful and the beautiful; their language was melody, and they were led by nature to delight in music, poetry, and painting, from the first. Hence these are the eldest employments we find them cultivating; the earliest historians were their rhapsodists, Homer, Hesiod, and the writers whose works constituted the very valuable EPIC CYCLE of Greece; a work, unhappily, long lost to the world, and from which Statius is supposed to have drawn the materials of his Thebaid.* Their earliest artists were their musi For the particulars of this celebrated work, see note in vol. ii. p. 262, 263, of the author's translation of Lucretius. T cians; as Orpheus, and the priests of Cybele, and others of like power; the first of whom is represented, not only as having harmonized the passions of men, but broken the ferocity of the beasts of the forests, and even tranquillized the tortures of the infernal regions. And of their early knowledge of colours and the art of designing we have a sufficient proof in various passages of the Cyclic poets that have reached us; while in Homer we have occasional references to their being applied, and by ladies, through the medium of tapestry, to the most important subjects of history. Thus Iris, in the third book of the Iliad, finds Helen occupied in representing in tapestry the evils which the Greeks and Trojans had suffered on her account in their battles; and when Andromache first heard the melancholy tidings of the death of Hector, she was engaged in a similar occupation. These, indeed, were employments of Trojan ladies, but what was common to them must have been common also to their neighbours of Greece. Among the Greek states, however, that of Athens was by far the most renowned for its love of letters and science; and amid the different eras which the Athenian history comprises, that of Pericles may be selected as affording the fairest specimen of the manner in which education was conducted, general learning and a knowledge of the arts acquired and disseminated, philosophy taught, and society cultivated and polished. This era may be regarded as contemporary with the reign of Artaxerxes the First of Persia, and Alexander the Second of Macedon, the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem under Nehemiah, and the establishment of the decemvirs at Rome: and if we extend its range through an entire century, as, for example, from the middle of the fourth to the middle of the third century before the birth of our Saviour, it will just reach from Herodotus to Demosthenes, and will, besides these celebrated characters, include the existence of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, among the poets; Thucydides, Xenophon, and Marsyas, among the historians; Lycias, Isæus, Isocrates, and Æschines, among the orators and rhetoricians; Socrates, Timæus Ocellus, Aristippus, Diogenes, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, among the philosophers; Eudoxus, among the astronomers; and Apelles, among the painters. The elementary branches of education were acquired among the Athenians, as among ourselves, sometimes by private instruction, but more generally by public schools; many of which, at the period I am now adverting to, had attained a very high degree of reputation, and were crowded with youths from other Grecian states, and even from foreign countries. For the first five or six years, however, not the smallest effort was made to improve the mind; the whole of this period of time being devoted, agreeably to the advice of Plato, and even of many earlier sages, to sports and pastimes, for the purpose of giving strength to the body; exercises which were even afterward continued with the greatest punctuality, under particular regulations, and constituted a very important branch of Athenian education. In this respect they seem to have imitated the example of the Persians, who never commenced training their children till they were five or six years old, not even those of royal birth. At the age of five or six, the rising generation of Persia were placed under the care of their magi, or men of letters, and combined a course of gymnastics with a course of moral science: the former consisted in learning to ride, to shoot with the bow, and to fight on horseback; the latter embraced and inculcated the valuable habits of honesty and speaking the truth, patience, sobriety, reverence to parents, and the practice of every other virtue. With them literature was subservient to morals. The general circle of study among the Greeks is well known to have comprised the seven liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Of these the first two, or grammar and rhetoric, were commenced earliest, and occupied by far the greatest attention of the scholar for poetry and declamation were now the most fashionable pursuits, and the Greek language was criticised with an accuracy amounting even to Fastidiousness, for new niceties and turns of expression, both in prose and se; the sense itself being often sacrificed to the sound as a matter of sub |