"I hover o'er

"This haughty city of Chaldean Bel,

"That once of old pour'd forth her festal pomp

"To do unholy worship to her Gods,

"That were no Gods, but works of mortal hand.”

"By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows, in the midst thereof."

There are few who have read this beautiful and mournful elegy-so strongly expressive of the. impassioned constancy of attachment felt by the A

Hebrews for their native land,-who have not been touched with emotions of pity, and almost joined in the holy indignation of the poet, when he exclaims, "O daughter of Babylon! who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be who rewardeth thee as thou hast served us."

The same sympathy is experienced when we behold the prophet on the banks of Chebar, or among the captives at Tel-abib, visited by revelations and visions of the Lord, so far distant from his beloved country; and the young reader naturally enquires, where is Chebar, and who is the Assyrian that has led away Israel and Judah, exiles from their native Zion?

The notices scattered through the works of ancient authors, from whom alone we can derive any information on these subjects, are so scanty, and, in many instances; so contradictory, that little can be gathered from them to gratify curiosity, or to satisfy enquiry. The history of nations of such high antiquity as that of the Assyrians, is so` mingled with fable and exaggeration, that it is a difficult task to separate at all times what is truefrom what is fictitious. The labour however is.

interesting; and whatever tends to throw light on the dealings of God with his people, is at all times fitted to be profitable.

For the object of history is not merely to trace the rise and fall of empires, or the different periods of time in which they have existed, or the virtues, vices, or talents of the princes by whom they have been governed, but chiefly to mark the Providence of God in those events-toobserve how he putteth down one, and setteth up another; and as he hath made of one blood all the dwellers on the earth, so he alone fixeth the bounds of their habitation.

What profane history is incapable of communicating, we find revealed in the Bible; namely, the secret causes of the rise and ruin of nations. We therein discover what princes God appointed as the ministers of his wrath, and who he raised up as dispensers of his goodness. And if, in his holy vengeance, he empowered the proud Assyrian to trample upon the apostate nation who had forsaken their God, and cast his laws behind them; so, in his mercy, he called the Persian,

"though he knew him not," to punish Babylon, and to deliver Judah.

As we are about to speak of the first king mentioned in authentic history, and doubtless the first -man who bore that envied, though perhaps unenviable title-we may be permitted previously to remark, that the primary form of government among mankind appears to have been parental or patri.. archal-such as we are familiar with in the history of Abraham and his immediate descendants. A number of such families probably first formed a community; and the common interest, and common defence of a number of these communities, in their turn, was the probable origin of régal government. There is no doubt that in the quarrels of such we may easily trace the first origin of war; and that, in the degradation of captives taken in battle, we find the rise of slavery, or the division of the people into such classes as those of freemen and bondmen. We there also mark the history of tributary nations, in the vanquished being bound, either by pecuniary means, or by vassalage, to acknowledge the supe

riority of the conqueror; while the homage paid to the victor, was the acknowledgment of inferiority on the part of those whom he had subdued.

In going back to ages so remote as the beginning of the Assyrian empire, we should be at a loss for a guide, if we did not trace the stream of time at once from its source, where it rises, as it were, among reeds and rushes; barren of incidents, indeed, but pure, as we derive our information from the sacred writings; but becoming adulter. ated as it descends and mingles with other materials, such as the legends and fables of profane bistory.

In our commencement, we follow the first of historians; first in point of time-first in the majesty of his subject-first in the essential qualities of an historian,—matchless in the simplicity of his narration,-unrivalled in the beauty, sublimity and exquisite pathos of his style,—and, apart from inspiration, worthy of the highest eulogium and profoundest credence; truth presiding over all his details, and producing his facts with all the solemnity of a witness giving evidence upon oath.