indebted to the Phenicians of Canaan and the natives of Asia Minor.

The fact becomes self-evident if we turn to the treasures of ancient Hellenic life and art which have been recovered from Mykenæ. The lions that guard the gate of the Akropolis are the counterpart of those discovered by Perrot on a rock-tomb at Kumbet, in Phrygia. The tombstones disinterred by Dr. Schliemann are wholly Hittite in their style and conception. So, too, the lion and bull made of gold-leaf, and excavated from one of the tombs, remind us of the lion and bull sculptured at Eyuk. Among the patterns, again, met with at the Mykenæ are several which go back to a Hittite original. Thus the palm-leaf is not only common on the terra-cotta dishes excavated by Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik but is embroidered on the robe of the figure found at Carchemish, and may be seen in its earliest form engraved upon Babylonian cylinders. A certain class of early Greek vases, as is well known, present us with a type of drawing which cannot be referred to a Phenician model, but which has much in it that suggests Hittite inspiration. The thick round limbs and tall helmets come from Asia Minor, not from Canaan, like the Hittite tiara on the ivory head discovered in the prehistoric tombs of Spata.

Art and myth, however, were not the only means whereby Hittite influence made itself felt in the distant West. Mr. Head has pointed out* that the Babylonian silver mina of 8,656 grains troy, which formed the standard for the money coined in Lydia and other parts of Asia Minor, as well as in Thrace, is identical with what the Assyrians called "the mina of Carchemish." It was received by the Hittites from Babylonia, and was carried by them to the nations of the distant West. Gyges and Croesus struck electron and silver coins according to standard, and in times long before them the Trojans of Hissarlik had used it for purposes of exchange. Six wedges of silver, about seven inches long by two broad, were discovered in what Dr. Schliemann has christened "the Treasure of Priam," and each of these wedges weighs about a third of the Babylonian maund. The hope of procuring silver seems to have been one of the main attractions of the Hittites to Asia Minor; at all events it is almost always in the neighborhood of silver mines that their memorials are found.

But the chief debt owed by the Western world to the Hittites still remains unsaid. They were distinguished as a writing people; Kirjath-Sepher, or "book-town," was the primitive name of one of their cities in Palestine; Khilip-sar, "the Prince of Aleppo," is specially mentioned on the Egyptian monuments as "the writer of books of the vile Kheta," and the hieroglyphics they used show that they were what it has fallen to the lot of but a chosen few among mankind to

* Academy for November 22, 1879.

be, the inventors of a system of writing. This system of writing they carried with them to Lydia, and it is, I believe, the source of that curious syllabary generally called Cypriote, from the number of Cyprian inscriptions found written in it, but which was employed throughout Asia Minor before the introduction of the simpler Ionic alphabet. Conservative Cyprus alone retained this syllabary long after it had passed out of use elsewhere; though most of the alphabets of Asia Minor kept certain of its characters to express sounds not represented by the Greek letters, and a short inscription found by Hamilton at Eyuk, in the close vicinity of the memorials of the Hittites, almost entirely consists of letters that belong to it.

And now who were these Hittites who played so important a part in the history of Western Asia, and whose very name had been well nigh forgotten until but the other day? Unfortunately that is a question, the answer to which we can for the present only guess at. The inscriptions they have left behind them are still undeciphered, and more are needed before the key that will unlock them can be found. We must therefore be content with the evidence of the proper names that occur on the monuments of Egypt and Assyria. These point unmistakably to the fact that the language of the Hittites was neither Semitic nor Aryan, but belonged to a group of dialects spoken in early times by Cilicians, Comagenians, Moschians, proto-Armenians, and other neighboring tribes, and of which Georgian is probably a living representative. It is among this group that we must include the language of the cuneiform inscriptions of Van, which are still but partially deciphered.

Whatever may have been their language, however, the Hittites had very marked physical characteristics, peculiar dress and arms, and a spirit and policy that clearly separated them from their neighbors. Their peaked shoes indicate that they originally came from a cold country such as the highlands of Armenia, and this indication is confirmed by our finding the inhabitants of this very country represented on the Assyrian monuments in the same costume as the Hittites. They must have established themselves on the Euphrates at an early date, and spread from thence southward and westward. Their westward extension brought them into contact with the Lydians and Greeks, their southward extension with the Egyptians and Hebrews. To this is due the prominent place they hold in the Old Testament, but for which the scholars of Europe would have been as ignorant even of their name as were the writers of Greece and Rome. Ezekiel declares that Jerusalem was born of an Amorite father and a Hittite mother, and Uriah the Hittite was one of the officers of David. It was for the kings of the Hittites that Solomon imported horses from Egypt, and from among their princesses he sought himself wives, like the Egyptian monarchs before him. Israel and Heth, indeed, long continued in alliance against the common Syrian enemy, and when Benhadad broke up the siege of Samaria it was be

cause he thought that the King of Israel had hired against him “the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians.' Hamath, too, which at one time was included within the Hittite territory, was the ally of David, and at a later day, as we learn from the records of Assyria, of the Jewish prince Uzziah also. Up to the last the existence of the Hittites depended on the success of their long struggle with their Semitic neighbors, whom they severed in two; and when their power and independence at last fell, it meant the final victory of the Semitic race.

Future exploration in Asia Minor, and above all the excavations that are being carried on at present on the site of Carchemish, have doubtless many more surprises for us. But no surprise can be greater than the resurrection of a forgotten people, who nevertheless played as important a part in the history of the world as Assyria or Egypt themselves. Brugsch-Bey has said, with justice, of "this cultivated and powerful people," that their "rule in the highest antiquity was of an importance which we can now only guess at." To us, perhaps, their chief importance lies in their influence upon the nascent civilization of the Western world. The clue has at last been found to the old problem of the origin of art and culture in Asia Minor, and of that perplexing yet well-marked element in early Greek art, which was neither of home-growth nor of Phenician importation. We may now trace this element back to its first home on the Euphrates, where Assyro-Babylonian art profoundly modified and intermingled with the forms and conceptions of Egypt, and we may watch its progress northward and westward until it meets the art of Phenicia, sprung from the same ancestry, though less deeply changed, on the shores of the Egean Sea. What it was at home we may still study in the lineaments of a bas-relief, brought from the Turkish castle of Birejik to the British museum, on which is portrayed a Hittite monarch, robed in the peculiar costume of his people and overshadowed by the winged solar disk.-A. H. SAYCE, in Fraser's Magazine.

SHAKESPEARE AS A PROSE WRITER.

It is related of Lord Mansfield, one the profoundest and acutest lawyers who ever adorned our bench, that he found himself very much impeded in his early career at the bar by the reputation which he had acquired for polite learning. A young man who associated with Pope, supped at the " Grecian," and could turn an Ode of Horace, was obviously quite incompetent to wrestle with the technicalities of Coke. It was in vain that he showed convincing proofs of the range and accuracy of his legal attainments. It was in vain that he surrounded himself with the ponderous tomes of Glanvill and

They

Bracton. His plodding brethren would not believe him. shook their heads at him "as a wit." They could conceive of no alliance between Themis and the Muses--between the idealism of poetry and the plain prose of the law. A fate somewhat similar seems to have befallen our great national poet. We have so long contemplated Shakespeare as a writer of verse, that it seems never to have struck any of his myriad commentators to contemplate him as a writer of prose. During the last century and a half his works have been studied from almost every point of view. Eminent theologians have discussed his theology, eminent lawyers have discussed his legal acquirements. Physicians have illustrated his knowledge of the phenomena of disease. Scholars have estimated his obligations to Greece and Rome. Psychologists and metaphysicians have been busy with his philosophy, historians with his history, and philologists with his language. But from the appearance of Rowe's preface to the appearance of Mr. Swinburne's Essays in England, and from the days of Lessing to the days of Gerviņus and Delius in Germany, we cannot call to mind a single attempt to estimate his position and merit as a writer of prose. Delius has indeed dealt at some length with this portion of Shakespeare's work, but his essay is almost entirely cenfined to an examination of the text itself. His criticism is not comparative, and he has therefore failed to realize the great services which Shakespeare rendered to English prose. He has not shown in what points his prose essentially differs from that of contemporary writers. He has not traced with sufficient minuteness the history of its development in the great dramatist's hands. He has not distinguished with sufficient precision its various styles.

The truth is that Shakespeare's prose is a phenomenon as remarkable as his verse. In one way, indeed, it is still more remarkable. The prose of Shakespeare stands alone. It was his own creation, as absolutely his own as the terza rima was Dante's, as the Spenserian stanza was Spenser's. For everything else, with the exception only of pure comedy, he had models. English blank verse had been all but perfected by Marlowe and Peele before it passed into his hands. That he added much to it is true. He varied the pauses; he made it more flexible; more perfectly adapted to catch, with exquisite subtlety, the ever-changing phases of thought; but he was not its creator. The historical play had been formulated before he took it up. Tragedy had been formulated. If we except three, all his plots were borrowed. His lyrics, matchless as they are, differ nothing in form, tone, and style from the lyrics of his immediate predecessors. But his prose is essentially original; and how greatly he contributed to the development of this important branch of literature will be at once apparent if we compare his prose diction with the diction both of those who preceded and those who followed him. In two qualities, and in two qualities alone, had English prose

excelled, and those qualities were harmony and majesty. For these it had been indebted to Hooker, and Hooker had learned them from the Latin classics. Such a style was, however, only adapted for subjects which admitted of rhetorical treatment. It provided only for one mode of expression. The rhetorical diction of Hooker and the theologians; the pedantic epigrammatic diction of Lyly and the euphuists; the coarse colloquial vulgarity of Nash and the author of the Martin Mar-Prelate tracts; the loose and slovenly prose dialogue of Peele and Marlowe; the diffuse, involved, and Italian periods of Puttenham and Sidney; the curt and somewhat awkward condensation of Bacon,* in his earlier style, represent very fairly the schools of prose which were flourishing when Shakespeare entered upon his task. Daniel, Donne, Hall, and Raleigh, who are beyond question the best prose writers-we are speaking merely of style in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, had not begun to publish when Shakespeare was engaged in composition. The translation of the Bible did not appear till 1611. Now, it must be obvious to any one who will take the trouble to consult them, that these writers, so far from furnishing Shakespeare with a model, do not even contain the germs of those qualities which constitute good prose in a tolerably advanced stage of its development. In one or two passages in his comedies, where they border closely on farce, Shakespeare may, it is true, have borrowed something from Nash and Peele, and he has of course employed occasionally the "three-piled hyperboles and spruce affectations" of Lyly, both seriously to enrich his diction and half-contemptuously to point his parodies. But here all influences from, and all imitations of, his predecessors cease.

What, then, did Shakespeare do for English prose? He gave it ease, he gave it variety and grace; qualities in which, till he took it in hand, it was entirely deficient. He showed for the first time how it could be dignified without being pedantic, how it could be full and massive without subordinating the Saxon to the Latin element, how it could be stately without being involved, how it could be musical without borrowing its rhythm and its cadence from the rhetoricians of Rome. He made it plastic. He taught it to assume, and to assume with propriety, every tone. He showed its capacity for dialectics, for exposition, and for narrative. He purified it from archaisms. Indeed, his diction often differs little from that of the best writers in the eighteenth century. The following passage, for example, will, in point of purity, rhythm, and composition, bear comparison with any paragraph in Addison:

"First my fear, then my courtesy, lastly my speech. My fear is

*We make no exception in favor of the Advancement of Learning, which was published in 1606, for its style is as Latin in its rhythm and structure as that of Hooker. Bacon's best prose compositions, and of very high order of excellence they are, are the Essay on Adversity and the Fragment on Death; but they, it must be remembered, did not appear till 1625,