tablets, on which the law of the Senate that had sent him into exile was engraved, for the purpose of destroying them. Expunging resolutions are not, therefore, original in the American Congress. It were well, however, if there was no occasion for them.

It is plain, from the Bible, that the Hebrew prophets were used to writing and making public, by recording on tables, in the temple or in their own houses, so much of their own prophesyings as concerned the people, or as it might be enjoined upon them thus to publish. Thus Habbakuk ii: 2: "And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it." And Jeremiah was repeatedly commanded to write down his visions. And we know that the Almighty wrote, with his own finger, the Ten Commandments on tables of stone. If the art of writing was not known before, it could surely have been learned from the tables of the law. But if the Mosaic Decalogue is not the original of all writing, (and I do not say it is,) it is, nevertheless, an instance of the knowledge of letters in a remote age. Moreover, all the world is now acquainted with the fact, that the history of cities and empires, and of great conquerors, especially of their battles, prisoners, victories, honors and offerings to their gods, was written, in olden times, on clay tablets, bricks, stones and cylinders-on the walls of temples, tombs and palaces and that this kind of writing goes back far beyond the reign of king Ahasuerus; and that we have the key which enables us to read these monumental records. There is nothing, then, contrary to history in the statement that the sleepless monarch commanded

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to bring the book of records of the Chronicles to be read before him. These chronicles are called, by Ctesias, diptherai basilikai. They seem to have been written on leather or parchment. The custom of the Persian

kings, in keeping a corps of scribes or royal historiographers about them, whose duty it was to write down what they said and did, has already been referred to and illustrated from cotemporary history. Similar chronicles, or registers of State, are referred to several times in the history of the Hebrew kings. The same custom prevails, to this day, in the Ottoman empire. "The king," says Bruce, "has near his person an officer, who is meant to be his historiographer; he is, also, keeper of his seal, and is obliged to make a journal of the king's actions, good or bad, without any comment of his own upon them. When the king dies, or soon after, this journal is delivered to the council, who read it over, and erase everything false in. it, while they supply every material fact that may have been omitted, whether purposely or not."

verse.

Nor were the records of the Chronicles of the Persian empire so dry and stupid an affair as many suppose. There was not within his reach any composition better suited to his perturbed state of mind than these records. They were instructive and usually well written, and in The records of Persia are still kept in this way. Ferdusi, who is regarded as the Homer of India, spent thirty years in writing his great poem, which contains one hundred and twenty thousand lines. And as the Sultan had promised him a dinar, perhaps two dollars and a half, for every line, we are not surprised at its length. This poem is nothing but a collection of the

chronicles of former poets, brought down from the creation to the reign of Mohammed Ghezny, in the beginning of the tenth century. This famous epic poem is said to be written "in all the harmony, strength and elegance of the most beautiful and harmonious language in the universe. It flows deep and strong, like a river of oil over every kind of channel."

Nor was the custom wholly confined to the East. The "Chronicles of the Cid," William of Malmesbury's "Chronicles of the kings of England," the six old English Chronicles, viz: Asser's Life of Alfred, and Chronicles of Eldred, Ethelred, Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and of Richard, and "the Chronicles of the Crusaders," of Robert of Gloucester, and Ossian, and the famous Spanish and English ballads, are a part and parcel of the history and literature of our own day. "The poet laureate" of her Majesty, is the modern successor of these royal scribes the crown paid register of eulogies. Such I conceive to have been the records read to Ahasuerus. In explaining the king's wakefulness, the Targum tells us that the king first had a dream that night, to the effect that he saw a man, who wished to speak to him, saying, "Haman desireth to slay thee and to make himself king in thy stead. Behold he will come unto thee early in the morning, to ask from thee the man who rescued thee from death, that he may slay him; but say thou unto Haman, What shall be done for the man whose honor the king studieth? And thou wilt find that he will ask nothing less from thee than the royal vestments, the regal crown, and the horse on which the king is wont to ride." This looks very much like telling where a thing is lost after

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it is found. It is well known, however, that the Ancients and the Orientals still are much given to dreams. Homer makes Rhesus die in a dream, from the sword of Diomed. That is, just as he was agonized with such a dream, it literally came to pass.

The king did not know why he could not sleep, but thought the reading of the Chronicles might amuse his mind. There were many other sources of pleasure or amusement at hand. His wives and concubines, and singers and musicians—why did he not turn to some of them for relief? The answer is, Providence designed to bring before his mind another matter. In Haman's house, his friends and his wife are arranging to have Mordecai hanged, but in the king's palace, God is disposing of matters for a very different result. The plots are to ripen, but the victim is not to gratify Haman's cruel prejudice.

It were a great gain to the intelligence and morals of our day, if more of the sleepless hours of young people were spent in reading standard histories, rather than in corrupting their minds and polluting their imaginations with the flash literature or the sensation poetry and essays of the day. It is not easy to overstate the pleasure and profit of history. Perhaps the king hoped by having the records read, to deceive the tediousness of the night, or that the pleasant passages would either invite slumber, or enable him to endure his wakefulness with greater ease. Zaccheus, says the quaint old Thomas Fuller, and may his shadow never be less, was low and little in stature; but when he had borrowed some hight from the fig tree, the dwarf became a giant but last minute beneath the arms, now grown

on a sudden above the heads of other men.

Thus our experimental knowledge is, in itself, both short and narrow. It cannot exceed the span of our own life. But when we are mounted on the tree of history, we can not only reach the year of Christ's incarnation, but even touch the top of the world's beginning, and at one view, oversee all the remarkable accidents of former ages.