the musical accompaniment, and long because it coincided with a long one, and for no other reason whatever, AND

THAT IN MANY INSTANCES IT IS IN VAIN TO SEEK FOR THE CAUSE OF LONG AND SHORT SYLLABLES IN THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE, AS THE CAUSE WAS ALTOGETHER EXTRANEOUS TO LANGUAGE, AND DEPENDED ON THE NOTES, LONG OR SHORT, OF THE MUSICAL ACCOM

PANIMENT. It is remarkable that in Sanskrit very many words are written indifferently with the long or short vowels, and that in the Egyptian language which uses Greek characters chiefly, a great number of words are written both with Epsilon and Eta, Omicron and Omega. What was the Licentia Poetica as practised by Homer and the earliest rhapsodists? It must be remembered that their compositions were sung or recited to the accompaniment of a lyre or some other musical instrument; and I believe the poet had the option of pronouncing all the vowels long or short, as suited his convenience, to make his verse harmonize with the tune he was singing. Does not every musical composer and singer still take the same liberty with every language spoken in Europe? The words of a song with a musical accompaniment are hardly intelligible, because their accent and usual pronunciation are completely changed, the language being subordinate, and a slave to the music. What are the rules of prosody but an enumeration of the expedients resorted to by the poet, to adapt and accommodate the length of the syllables of his verses to the musical notes to which they were sung? As an agreement between the two was imperative, and the music could not change, the language necessarily did.

B. Beta from Dutens.

. Beta from Rose.

II. Beta.

B. Biarkan from the Runic Alphabet in Mallet's Northern Antiquities.

Beta, the name of the second letter of the Greek, appears to be derived from Beth, the second letter of the Phoenician

and other Shemitic alphabets, but not so the form, of which I cannot find the prototype in any Oriental language. Beth in Hebrew, and most of the Shemitic languages, with slight modifications, signifies a house; and as the forms of the letters have not the most distant resemblance to a house, they do not appear to be so old as the name. I believe, however, the etymology of Beth in the Shemitic languages to be Bet (Coptic), costa, a rib, and it is certain that in Hebrew, Ethiopic, Syriac, and Samaritan, Beth has much more resemblance to a rib joined to the spine, than to a house. The Greek form of Beta is probably older than that of either of the Shemitic alphabets; and what is rather singular, is the very counterpart of the Runic, which has induced me to give the latter a place, and it is remarkable enough that Biarkan, the name of the letter in the Runic alphabet, signifies house in Persic, as Beth does in Hebrew. It is further remarkable that Biarkan is evidently compounded of two tents, the primitive dwellings of the human race, and more especially of a pastoral people, and the form of a tent in China, where nothing changes, is said to predominate in the architecture of that nation, and still attests their Nomadic origin.

III. Gamma.

Samaritan, or Phoenician Ghimel.

Orientalists are fond of deriving the name of this letter from the Hebrew word Gimel, or Gamal, a camel, and if this be the true etymology the Syriac is probably the oldest form, as it bears the closest resemblance to the long neck of that animal. Dutens supposes the form he has given of Gamma to be by much the most ancient of the letter, in which I believe he was entirely mistaken, and that the form given by Rose has much stronger claims to be regarded as such. Dutens copied it from the medals of Gelo and Agrigentum, the workmanship of which is extremely rude, and supposes that it passed into the Roman C; I strongly suspect, however, that that letter, or at any rate its soft sound, was derived from one of the forms of Sigma, and that Dutens's Gamma is a common Roman G badly formed.

IV. Delta.

Samaritan, or Phoenician Daleth.

The name of the letter in Hebrew is Daleth, which signifies a door, to which, however, the character in that language bears very little resemblance. There can be little doubt that both the form and name of the Greek letter were derived from the Phoenician alphabet.

v. Ei (Epsilon).

Samaritan, or Phoenician He.

The forms of this letter, as given by Rose, agree with that of Dutens, and vary very little, except as they are written from left to right, or from right to left. He, the Oriental name of the letter, is not significant, or in other words does not explain itself, either in Hebrew or any other Shemitic language that I can discover. Plutarch informs us that the ancient name of this letter in Greek was Ei, and this name it still retains in the Coptic and Sahidic alphabets, in which we find the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet arranged nearly in the same order, together with eight additional. Every thing connected with the Greek alphabet appears to be sheer mythology, from Cadmus and his sixteen Phoenician letters, to the final settlement of the Athenian alphabet, in the archonship of Euclid. Cadmus himself is the mere creation of fiction, his name being derived from the Hebrew word Kedem, the east, or the sun. He is a mere shadow, vox et præterea nihil, and every thing connected with him appears to be as unsubstantial as himself. He is said to have brought only sixteen letters into Greece, and we cannot discover any Shemitic alphabet which contains fewer than twenty-two. This is the case with the Phoenician or Samaritan, the Hebrew and the Syriac; and not only do these alphabets agree as to the number of letters, but also as to their name and power. The Greek alphabet, in the age of Homer, is said to have consisted of those sixteen primitive Cadmean letters, and yet in every part of his works we find the alphabet as complete as it was after the archonship of

Euclid, and, what is still more singular, both the Iliad and the Odyssey are each divided into twenty-four books, apparently for no other reason than because the Greek alphabet contained twenty-four letters, each of which has given its name to a book. I have already remarked, that we learn from Plutarch that the name of Epsilon among the ancient Greeks was Ei, and that Ei is its name in the Coptic alphabet, and we actually find it written Ei in one of the epigraphs to the 5th Book of the Iliad. There are two, the first being Aroundovs ȧpioтeia, the bravery of Diomed, and the other Εἰ βάλλει Κυθέρειαν, "Αρηά τε, Τυδέος υἱός, that is, Ei (the name of the letter) the son of Tydeus wounds Venus and Mars. It is remarkable that perhaps the oldest quotation of the Iliad was made from this book, that by Herodotus in the second book of his History (c. 116.), who refers to neither letter, number, nor line, but makes use of the first of the above epigraphs. The probability, therefore, is that both epigraphs are as old as the age of Herodotus, and perhaps even that of Peisistratus. Again, it is remarkable that the lines quoted by him are not in the 5th Book of the Iliad as it has come down to us, and do not occur until line 289. of the 6th Book. The division of the Iliad, therefore, in the age of Herodotus was not what it is at present. That poem contains about 15,673 lines; and if we suppose the Greek alphabet to have consisted of sixteen letters, and the Iliad to have been divided into sixteen books, they will average at about 980 lines, and by some such arrangement those quoted by Herodotus may have formed part of the 5th Book, which however contains 909 lines in its present state. At any rate, we are quite certain that the ancient name of the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet was Ei, and I regard this as a most important fact. The mode in which I purpose to employ it is as follows: We know that Asia was peopled and civilised before Europe, and that the Greeks and Romans borrowed their alphabets thence. The next question is, to what

* Επιμέμνηται δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐν Διομήδεος ἀριστείῃ· λέγει δὲ τὰ ἔπεα οὕτω. Ενθ' ἔσαν οἱ πέπλοι, κ. τ. λ.

extent did they, in the first instance, adopt their mode of writing. The Phoenicians, in common with the other Shemitic people, wrote from right to left, and in that direction. we find the legends of the earliest Greek medals, and the oldest inscriptions in Etruscan, or ancient Greek characters. The Oriental nations omitted the vowels in writing to such an inconvenient extent, that their descendants have endeavoured to remedy the defect by the invention of vowel points; and Lanzi, in his Saggio di Lingua Etrusca, assures us that this was the case with the Etrurians and other people of ancient Italy. We learn from him that E, in some instances, was equivalent to the diphthong EI, and he adduces the Sigaan inscription as an example of it. (Tom. i. p. 88.) Payne Knight, in his Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet, referring to the same document, says "the first Sigaan written about six hundred years before the Christian era has EIMI; but the second copied from it, probably about fifty years later, has EMI." (P. 18.) Now I believe, that in the early ages of Greece there was no grammatical anomaly in this, and that no one was deceived. Accustomed to see the Asiatics omit the vowels in writing to a great extent, they themselves did something like it, and in many instances READ THE NAME OF THE LETTER INSTEAD OF THE LETTER ITSELF. In the second Sigæan inscription E only was written, but they read its name EI, and there was no anomaly. This mode of reading is still practised invariably in Sanskrit with regard to A short, which is always supposed to be annexed to every consonant ; and the Anti-Masorists, who wished to do away with the Hebrew vowel points, proposed to read instead of them the first vowel that occurs in writing the name of every conso

nant.

VI. Zeta.

We find the elements of this double letter exhibited in the Medals of Trazene, in the words Sdeus Eleutherios, i. e. Zeus Eleutherios. The Eolians, however, reversed the order of the initial letters, and wrote Dseus, Jupiter.