nature than the common name of a country, city, river, or other place, as of that place; or the name of any common thing whatever, as of that thing, in any known established language: that the names of places are little liable to alter will, of the two, be the proposition most readily conceded; but the names of common things, as of a horse or a cup, a house or a tree, will be found to be as little subject to fluctuation; so little indeed, that it may be almost pronounced impossible that an established extensively spoken language should die, unless one conceives a whole people to be at once extinguished by a plague or pestilence: a thing which, as of a whole people, never yet happened, and is in itself utterly improbable. That the Latin and Greek, therefore, are dead languages, whatever credit I might have long given to it from the influence of education, I can never more believe: but what I can very readily believe is, that they were never living languages; and what is very easily intelligible is, that, either from a desire to construct an universal language, or to devise a language, on the contrary, which

should be private, and known to few only, as to the learned, they might both have been invented as artificial languages; there are, indeed, two obvious methods by which such artificial languages might be constructed, that is to say, either by drawing portions of them from all the known existing established languages, condensing such detached portions into one common mass, and subjecting that mass to conventional grammatical rules; or, secondly, by partially and sparingly distorting known terms, and under such slight distortion or alteration, giving them in such artificial languages the same meaning as they had before. Either of these methods would answer the motives above supposed, as the probable inducements for the designing and forming of such languages, (which motives, indeed, may both be considered as concurrent to the same end,) and upon these principles mainly do I apprchend the Latin and Greek languages to have been, in reality, invented. But, whatever may have been the motives (centering all of them, perhaps, in a desire to disguise certain branches of learning from the vulgar and unen

lightened, to whom, when only half acquired or half digested, they might only be sources of abuse, and incentives, perhaps, to vice or crime,) it is certain, that artificial languages have been invented in different æras of the world, as the Sanscrit among the Indians, the learned idiom among the Chinese, to which may be added, as unspoken languages, the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the mythological statuary of those we call Greeks and Romans. As to the hieroglyphics and the Greek and Roman statuary, nobody will deny that they constitute mysterious and disguised, though unspoken, languages; and it is not less certain that the writing in such languages as the Latin and Greek, would, to those who were not initiated in them, be just as mysterious as the use of the hieroglyphics themselves; and the analogy between the use of such dead languages, as they are called, and that of the hieroglyphics, will be found in a practical view to be still closer, as they have been employed in a similiar manner, namely, for the important purpose of forming

private records or memorials of every sort of valuable knowledge in every art and science.

Other methods of enigmatical disguise, subservient to the same purposes, might be these ; the referring to a particular thing by the mention of another thing, very different in kind, but having a like name in sound, which is commonly called punning, or playing upon a word; the treating of one place or country under cover of another, from some casual resemblances between the two, either in respect of the shape of their outlines, or their being the one a colony to, or under the controul, or in long connection or alliance with the other; and, again, by ascribing the circumstances of friendship, affinity, and consanguinity, (or their opposites, as enmity and the like,) to different places or countries as they severally make up, or are severed from other places and countries. If the reader will carry these, as some of the many ancient methods of enigmatizing, in his recollection, I think it cannot fail to appear to him very satisfactorily, that, in like manner as

the compositions attempted to be explained in the preceding volumes, are to be understood in a sense very different from what he might have previously supposed, so the two famous poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, do, in fact, covertly treat of objects of far greater consequence than they primarily and ostensibly import; and this I am about to shew in the ensuing dissertation. If, indeed, the classics in general contained no other matters than what is now commonly understood from them, they would be little worth the seven or ten years of our lives which we pass in the acquisition of their languages; but if in acquiring their languages our youth were at the same time taught to imbibe the various sorts of information they contain, their value would be equal to that of the Sybil's Books, and their contents would be learned with pleasure as well as with profit. To apply this reasoning to the Poems of Homer, if the different ages of antiquity were really entitled to all those praises we bestow upon them on the score of wisdom and skill in all the arts and sciences, is it credible that