fluous, since there is nobody who is not willing to admit that they disguise certain latent meanings, of which it is to be regretted that the clue is wanting; it was not difficult, however, after a little time devoted to them, to discover considerable analogy between the gods of the Greeks and Romans, and some of those of the Egyptians taken individually, and some analogy also between the method of the hieroglyphic engravers and the Greek and Roman statuaries, even in their groupes; due allowance being made for the plain simple, unadorned, and even uncouth style, of the former, when compared with the high-wrought elegance of the latter; but just as I was beginning to despair of making any further progress than what tended to establish those analogies, I happened to be drawn by accident to the consideration of the Pillar of Pompey, the Sphinx, and the Pyramids, under a new point of view; namely this, that, independently of any emblematical marks which they may have about them, they are each of them, individually and en masse, disguises of secret meanings, and that they are

therefore hieroglyphics, as it were, in themselves; and finding on a trial of other great masses of architecture by the same test, that they also might be considered as symbolical, without reference to the smaller sculptures with which they are so profusely covered, I was led to conclude that (while the smaller hieroglyphics might have been intended, by their numbers and beauty of their execution, only to deter an uninformed posterity from destroying the buildings on which they are found,) the general forms of those buildings concentrated in themselves, independently of their sculptures, the genuine proper objects for our study and research and thus, by a summary process, I for some time thought that I had discovered the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, or rather, that by being as it were merely a mantle intended to veil the secret designs of the architect, they had in themselves next to no meaning at all.

I would not, indeed, undertake to say even now, that the conjecture above stated, in respect to the hieroglyphics engraved in such astonishing num

bers on the Egyptian temples, is wholly unfounded; namely, that they may have no other meaning than to excite attention and bespeak a veneration for the objects on which they are inscribed, such objects being themselves, by their figure or mode of construction, the true symbols of what is intended to be concealed; yet (speaking of my acquaintance with the hieroglyphics only as to the humble point it has attained,) I cannot doubt that those which are found in smaller numbers, as on mummies, on Cleopatra's needle, and the like, have in fact a particular and appropriate meaning, capable of being unravelled individually, without reference to so concise and little satisfactory an explanation as the one above imagined.*

On the whole, it appears to me that an endeavour to discover a clue to the hieroglyphics is not altogether hopeless; and, by way of encourage

The contents of the preceding Treatise on the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac, furnish some evidence of the proba bility of this.

ment thereto, I would leave it to the reflection of any reasonable mind, whether it be not presumable that those meanings, which so much ingenuity, labour, time, and expense, have been employed to disguise, are not likely to be of far more importance than the mere sculptured symbols which are the vehicles of them? Indeed,

every presumption leads forcibly to the conclusion that they were intended to commemorate things highly useful to mankind in general, or to the particular nations by whose encouragement they were composed, or at whose expense they were wrought,

But is it credible, that, if the ancients wished to transmit their knowledge to posterity, instead of following the plain and simple method of the moderns, they would have resorted to a mode so abstruse and complicated? and (since it is often thought sufficient, in examining a statue or relief, to decide, in respect of a given figure, that it was intended for a Bacchus rather than a Mercury, a Mars rather than a Hercules, and the like,) would they wilfully have exposed their labours to such

risk, that their aim should in the end be totally defeated? that what they intended only as the shadow should be mistakenly grasped for the substance, and the fable itself become the object of research with posterity, instead of the mystery lying beneath it? In answer to these questions it may be observed, that the same objections lie against the secret languages of the Chinese and of the Indians, which are well known to be confined to the learned of those nations, and to be out of the reach of the common people; but as to the fact itself, it most certainly appears to have been the universal practice of antiquity, ως παντ' άγαν γ' αινικτα κ ασαφη λεγειν. Soph. Ed. Tyr. In conformity with which, it is said of Apollo, the God of Poetry, (by Heraclitus in Plutarch,) εδε λεγει, εδε κρύπτει αλλα σημαίνει, and when, in the beginning of the sixth Æneid, the Sybil, inspired by the same god, horrendas canit ambages, it is added that she does so, obscuris vera involvens. So again, the declaration of Socrates in the second Alcibiades of Plato goes most strongly to the same effect. Αινιττεται, ω