were scarcely more than visions for a moment, before darkness again
covered the view. Our mythology and philosophy of the past were almost
equally misty and vague. History was to us a succession of facts; empire
succeeding empire, and one form of civilization another, with scarcely
more connection than in the scenes of a theatre;--the great isolated
fact of all being the existence of the Jews. All cosmic myths and noble
conceptions of Deity and pure religious beliefs were only offshoots of
Hebrew tradition.

This, we are pained to say, is all changed now. Our beloved dates, our
easy explanation, and popular narrative are half dissolved under the
touch of modern investigation. Roman History abandons poor Romulus and
Remus; the Flood sinks into a local inundation, and is pushed back
nobody knows how many thousands of years; an Egyptian antiquity arises
of which Herodotus never knew; and Josephus is proved ignorant of his
own subject. Nothing is found separate from the current of the world's
history,--neither Hebrew law and religion, nor Phoenician commerce,
nor Hindoo mythology, nor Grecian art. On the shadowy Past, over the
deserted battle-fields, the burial-mounds, the mausolea, the temples,
the altars, and the habitations of perished nations, new rays of light
are cast. Peoples not heard of before, empires forgotten, conquests not
recorded, arts unknown in their place at this day, and civilizations of
which all has perished but the language, appear again. The world wakes
to find itself much older than it thought. History is hardly the same
study that it once was. Even more than the investigations of hieroglyphs
and bass-reliefs and sculptures, during the past few years, have the
researches in one especial direction changed the face of the ancient
world.

LANGUAGE is found to be itself the best record of a nation's origin,