" majesty more rapturously than he has done in his letter of the twenty-first of October, from Moyallo. When it is considered that by the forfeiture of his father, "lands extending 110 miles, and containing 574,628 acres," fell to the crown, there is something unspeakably shabby, and, -be it said with abashed countenance before those "royal eyes which added fulness of joy with admiration to the beholders," and in presence of such majesty as was envied, but not equalled by any earthly prince"-peculiarly Elizabethan in the pittance so grudgingly given for the support of such an earldom, restored with so great parade. To this parsimony may certainly, in some degree, though less than to his English religion, be attributed the utter failure of the hopes based upon the appearance of James FitzGerald, the Tower Earl of Desmond, in Ireland. But the reader will not need to be informed that no success of this Earl of Desmond would have effected the pacification of Ireland. Had he been able to allure or to bribe to his service every follower of his house, he might have saved to the queen a thousand pounds, the precise sum paid to the White Knight for his treachery to the Sugane Earl; but unless, simultaneously, John Anias could have dealt with Florence MacCarthy, and Walker, or Combus or Atkinson with O'Neill and O'Donnell, there would have remained those powerful chieftains with the whole force of the three most numerous and warlike septs in Ireland to welcome the Spaniards to Kinsale. It was the unaccountable action under the walls of that old town that decided the fate of Ireland, when five thousand Spaniards remained within their intrenchments, but dimly conscious of the battle that was fought and lost within their hearing! The same Irish chieftains, who had annihilated an English army at the Blackwater, were utterly routed by the Lord Deputy Mountjoy and his force. He and they were brave men, but they could not be braver men than were led out by Marshal Bagual, from Armagh.-Four thousand foot, and three hundred and fifty horse! and who were scattered like chaff before the legions of O'Neill. The inactivity of the Irish chieftain after his victory at the Blackwater remains a puzzle to the historian to this day; scarcely less so his conduct at Kinsale. Is it credible that O'Neill could have been so infatuated as to fight that battle without previous concert with the Spaniards? If he did so he grievously tempted fortune, and paid a heavy penalty for his rashness. If the Spaniards failed him after promising a simultaneous attack upon the rear of the English force, it was his misfortune, and their disgrace; but why even then that feeble resistance, that speedy overthrow, that disastrous flight, that scandalous spectacle of the two most noted chieftains of the Irish race," with all the principal gentlemen of Ulster and Connaght," and those veteran warriors who had defeated Harrington in the Glyns, defied Ormond, chased Essex through Munster, and wholly annihilated Bagnal, flying headlong homewards, and abandoning within a besieged town the allies whom they had invited to their aid? Don Juan de Aquila added little to his renown by his Irish expedition; but the least blameworthy of his proceedings was to capitulate as he did when he beheld the only native army there was, utterly routed, and its chiefs flying panic-stricken back to their fastnesses. O'Neill's victory at Armagh led to nothing, his defeat at Kinsale insured, we are told, "the honour and safety of Queen Elizabeth, the reputation of the English nation, the cause of religion, and of the crown of Ireland." ART. II.-Egyptian Chronicles. By William Palmer, M.A. A STRANGE world it is in which we live. With our lot cast in what appears to be the end of time, we seem to to be continually coming upon fresh sources of information respecting occurrences in the beginning of time. Monuments have been discovered that had lain buried for ages: inscriptions have been deciphered that had proved unintelligible to both Greeks and Romans: ancient writers of all nations have been compared, and corrected, or elucidated one from the other. From a comparison of languages we have obtained true notions respecting the history of each, and affinities of all: out of a hundred conflicting eras and epochs we have moulded at length a definite system of chronology: we know both the shape and extent of our earth. Unless we are vastly out in our geological reckon 66 ings, we are not less certain of the high antiquity of our planet, than we are of its comparatively recent adaptation as the local habitation" of the race which descended from Adam. We are no longer content to call earth, air, fire, and water, elements: but can resolve them into their constituents at pleasure, and reproduce them sufficiently to show that we have unlocked the secret of their composition. Earth's compound substances have been resolved into their elementary gases-the nearest approach to immateriality that is cognizable by the senses. Earth's crust has been discovered to consist of stratified and nonstratified rocks-a consequence of the immemorial agencies of water and fire-earth's denizens, before it was in a condition to support man, are attested by fossiliferous remains of colossal magnitude and remote antiquity. Finally, the records of the earliest peopling of the earth by man, have been exhumed, and interpreted systematically, perhaps for the first time, since their language had ceased to be a living one. Though Herodotus and Berosus flourished upwards of two thousand years nearer to the events of which they treat, it is undeniable that Egyptian and Assyrian history may be much more accurately gleaned from the recent discoveries of Champollion, Sir H. Rawlinson, and others, than from those comparatively contemporary writers. Thus it is that in the present old age of the world, our thoughts are forcibly thrown back upon the transactions of its childhood; and just when we seem standing on the tiptoe of expectation of what we shall be, we are drinking in echoes of the first lispings of our race, and of time antecedent to its very commencement. Why, or wherefore, revelations so momentous, and so long concealed, have been reserved for the nineteenth century, it may be premature to conjecture: So far as we can see, there is no reason why the same discoveries should not have been made ages ago, and some of them a good deal before others. It is in the simultaneous bringing to light of so much truth that the designs of Providence may be traced without presumption; though, in each case, some apparent trifle may have been suggestive of serious investigation, and ultimate success. To apply these remarks to the study of Egyptian antiquities. It has been brought about, and carried to the perfection already attained to, by a tissue of accidents; and yet, of such sequence and combination, as to savour strongly of serving as means to an end. It was in the train of a French army, fitted out for a widely different purpose-that of obtaining possession of the high road to India-that modern science may be said to have invaded Egypt. Those who had fought over its material territory, sat down together amicably to examine the wonders of antiquity that each had discovered: and peaceful travellers, like Belzoni, were free to penetrate to the interior of a country which the late campaign had opened so signally to all comers from Europe. His adventures form a remarkable section in the chapter of accidents, as we may learn from Mr. Palmer. "Most persons who have at all attended to Egyptian antiquities will remember with interest how slight an accident it was, which led Belzoni to his grand discovery of the tomb of Seti I. the father of Rameses the Great. In the wild desert valley of Biban el Malouk, the bareness of which contrasts so strangely with the green plain on the other side of the Assassif, when; in crossing by the mountain path, one sees from the top both sides at once, at the foot of one of those lateral ridges in which are many of the Kings' tombs, he noticed a slight depression of the sand, as if the rains which, even in the Thebaid, fall in some years, had there soaked through to some cavity. So he dug, and came first upon a descending gallery, and then, after trying the rock at which it seemed to end, and which sounded hollow, he broke his way through it, and found himself in the most perfect and the most magnificent of all the royal tombs -one unentered by Greek visitors under the Ptolemies, and connected with reigns of the highest historical interest (for Seti I. and his son Rameses II. are the chief elements of the Sesostris of Herodotus and Diodorus) the gorgeous paintings of which, partly historical, and partly relating to the dead, preserved intact in all the freshness of their colours, have been the source of the most striking of those fac-similes of Egyptian sepulchral paintings, which are now to be seen in the museums of Europe.' But had these "gorgeous paintings" a true historical meaning of their own, unlike mere works of the imagination? Chance, or something infinitely beyond chance, had appositely made the westernmost mouth of the Nile the repository of that uncouth block of black basalt-the celebrated Rosetta stone-with its threefold, i.e. sacred, civil, and Greek versions of the same inscription in honour *Palmer's Egyptian Antiq. Introduct. p. 1. of Ptolemy Epiphanes, as appears from the Greek text. Its discovery and arrival in England in 1802 proved a powerful incentive throughout Western Europe, to the study of hieroglyphics. This was still further advanced by a second discovery. : "In the island of Phila, situated high up the Nile, (we quote from a well-known work) an obelisk was found, and thence brought to England, on which were two cartouches or frames, containing hieroglyphics, joined together. One of these presented invariably the group already explained in the Rosetta stone by the name of Ptolemy. The other evidently contained a name composed in part of the same letters, and followed by the sign of the feminine gender. This obelisk had been originally placed on a base, bearing a Greek inscription, which contained a petition of the priests of Isis to Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and spoke of a monument to be raised to both. There was consequently every reason to suppose that the obelisk bore these two names conjointly and observation proved that the three letters common to both, P.T.L. were represented in the female name by the same signs as occurred for them in the kings. Thus there could be no reasonable doubt as to the second name, which put the learned investigators in possession of the other letters, which enter into its composition. All this Champollion claimed exclusively as his own. Mr. Bankes, however, maintains that he had previously deciphered the name of Cleopatra, and endeavours to show that M. Champollion must have been aware of the discovery............. When these first and more laborious measures had been taken, the work was comparatively easy: and Champollion, who at first had imagined that his system could apply only to the reading of Latin and Greek names, hieroglyphically expressed, soon found that the older names yielded to the key, and that successive dynasties of Pharoahs, and of Persian monarchs who had ruled in Egypt, had recorded their names also, with their titles and exploits, in the same character............. Suffice it to say that new discoveries have gradually enlarged, and perhaps almost completed the Egyptian alphabet, till we are in possession of a key to read all proper names and even--though not with equal certainty-other hieroglyphical texts. To proper names the application is so simple that you may be said to possess a means of verifying the system perfectly within reach. For you have only to walk to the Capitol or the Vatican, with Champollion's alphabet, and try your skill upon the proper names in any of the Egyptian inscriptions."* If such was the state of knowledge thirty years back, * Cardinal Wiseman's Lectures on the Counexion between Science and Revealed Religion. Lect. viii. |