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and that a treaty of commerce and navigation, was concluded between them, as early as the consulship of Brutus, which treaty was engraved on a marble pillar; but, that when this inscription was discovered, so soon after as the second Punic war, no Roman was to be found, who could read it. Such an alteration had even the Latin tongue suffered in that short space of time.

The Punic letters, we also know, underwent considerable alteration: "Facto senatusconsulto, ne quis postea Carthaginensis, aut literis Græcis, aut Græco sermoni studeret, ne aut loqui cum hoste, aut scribere sine interprete posset," * The Carthaginians, indeed, it is averred, adopted the Roman alphabet very early. In later ages, it is true, the Latin language was the common dialect of the Africans, as well as the Punic. St. Augustin tells us, he himself learned the Latin language in Africa; inter blandimenta nutricum. And the same author notifies the decay of the Punic language: "Proverbiam notum est Punicum, quod quidem Latiné vobis dicam, quis Punicè non omnes nostis." The Roman characters were intro¬

• Justin.

duced

duced into Carthage, as early as the first Punic war. Supposing, then, even the strongest similitude between the Irish and the Latin alphabet, what is the unforced consequence from this fact? Assuredly, not that the Irish could not have received.letters from the Phoenicians. On the contrary, the Carthaginians having borrowed the Roman, and the Irish having adopted the Carthaginian, the fair inference would be, that the Irish being in such manner connected with both, might very naturally be supposed to bear a genuine derivative resemblance to both. What was the character in which Plautus wrote his comedy of Panulus? The Punic speech, which he puts into the mouth of one of his dramatis personæ, is, I am told, accurately good Irish, Colonel Vallancy has at least declared it to be so, and has even been able to translate it. This was written during the second Punic war, and has been transmitted down to us in the Latin letter. Nay, is not St. Patrick, in his own life, made to declare, that Fiech, the great poet of Ireland, found so little difference in the character, that he read the Latin Gospels in fourteen days, and also composed an ode in praise of the Saint?*

* Vallancy.

The

Amid those revolutions, which all nations have experienced, there are few countries which have preserved their property, or their acqui sitions, pure and unmixed. How strongly is this verified, for instance, in Egypt! Deprived, three and twenty centuries ago, of her natural proprietors, she has seen her fertile fields successively a prey to the Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Georgians, and at length, to the race of Tartars denominated Ottoman Turks. Syria, as well as Egypt, has undergone similar revolutions, We may trace her distresses from the Assyrians of Nineveh, who, passing the Euphrates about the year 750 before the Christian æra, obtained possession of almost the whole country lying to the north of Judea; next, to the Babylonians; and so on to their present masters, the ravagers from Scythia. But, how grieved, as well as astonished, are we, when we behold the present barbarism and ignorance of the Copts, descended from the profound genius of the Egyptians, and the brilliant imagination of the Greeks; when we reflect, that to the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of unfeeling contempt, we owe many of our arts, and many of our sciences; and when we recollect, that it has even been a problem, whe

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ther the understanding of negroes be of the same species with that of white men ! *

The mind which is not totally ignorant of the ordinary course of physical and moral causes, but knows the limits of probability and impossibility, is not to be driven from the standard of truth, by the bold assertions of one writer, nor the wily insinuations of another. Ireland was, at one time, the school of the West, and the quiet habitation of sanctity and learning. Many, and unequivocal circum† stances concur to prove, that during the barbarous ages, when the rest of Europe was involved in turbulent darkness, this sequestered island, enjoying the blessings of peace, was literally the happy and the scientific country it has been described by Bede. Even Dr. Macpherson is candid enough to confess, that the seminary of monks established by Columba, an Irishman, in the island of Jona, in the sixth age, the year of Christ 565, seems to have been the only one within the territories of the Scots, which could furnish men who could read or write. If they kept any register of transactions, says he, they were destroyed or lost, in the Norwegian conquest of the Hebrides by Harold

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Greek name for the Pelasgi, signifying Northern wanderers. Whereas, Kelt, on the contrary, implied a fixed people, and was a name which the Scythians, or Pelasgi, gave to those colonies that had long resided in a place. The Irish had the Bobeloth, or common letter, and the Ogham, or sacred letter. The former was the same, or nearly the same, with the Phoenician. The latter, like the Egyptian, was an alphabetic and hieroglyphic compound. The Irish was the character formerly used in Spain, as is evident from the manuscripts copied in Aldretes Origin de la Lingua Castellana.

The ancient Ogham consisted of two species, the Ogham, and Ogham Croabh. The Ogham was the sacred character of the Druids, and was probably so called from the Hebrew word ochum, or bogham, which signifies wisdom. And hence, as these are words of foreign extraction, a probable reason why the letters under this denomination, were not the invention of the Hiber Druids, but, the sacred characters of the Carthaginian, Phoenician, and Egyptian priests, if not of all the Heathen priests of antiquity; for Herodotus assures us, that the Greeks and Ionians wrote in characters composed entirely of

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