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died more satisfied. I left England to see you―to receive the imprecations of your wounded spirit—to be trampled under your feet.' 'Do not talk so, I beseech you, Seymour,' I replied; 'live and be happy. It is my request -the prayer of your friend.'-' Friend!' exclaimed he, 'name not that word-have I not, with the polluted hands of an assassin, broke into the cherished treasure of your heart? Have I not blasted all the prospects of your future days? Generous Manville; my fallen state has robbed you of your just and long anticipation. But do not relent;-do not add, to what I endure, the agony of your compassion,-the intolerable pang of your forgiveness!'—' Stop, Seymour,' I interrupted;- live, and receive my forgiveness;- No, Sir,' he resumed, 'I must not, will not be forgiven. In all the stores of divine mercy, there is no drop for a crime like mine. But the fibres of health and life are now broken for ever ;-all I prayed for, on this side of eternity, was to see my once-loved, honoured, injured friend; to hear his maledictions, and expire.' This horrid spectacle of remorse and anguish unnerved my heart. Seeing me weep, he exclaimed-' Are those drops for me?' Then, with an altered voice— 'Why do you not kill me? Come, I will provoke you to it; I will uncouple the furies of revenge and hate. Remember your Emily!' I stood stupified with horror. He burst into a maniac laugh; then said, in a whisper-' See, there is the funeral procession! see the white plumes, and the torches ! she must be buried by night!—it is so dark a deed!' Here he became so wild, that it was with great difficulty we could hold him. At length, nature became exhausted, and he sunk into a stupor that lasted several minutes. He then opened his eyes, and fixed them upon me. My friend,' said he, it is now over. There is a paper in my pocket which will disclose to you, but faintly, what I have suffered. Emily is no more. She survived the discovery of my perfidy little more than a month. Oh, Manville! since I departed from honour, I have trod upon scorpions-that paper will tell you more.' His voice faltered, his lips trembled convulsively, and his eyes closed for ever.

"Thus perished Seymour, the chosen friend of my life; once the sharer of all my griefs and all my pleasures. Endued with tastes and sentiments that taught him to love and admire all that was honourable and comely, he cultivated them to intensity. One guilty passion broke down the weak barriers these sentiments had reared, and fraud and dishonour entered the breach. After having performed the last rude obsequies over his remains, I opened the papers he had bequeathed me. They developed the whole history of his struggles between duty and passion. They depictured his agonies-agonies, which not even Emily's affectionate cares could soothe. They detailed also the sufferings of that lovely being, when the imposture was revealed to herher shame, her remorse, the loathing with which she regarded the perfidious destroyer of her peace. She sunk rapidly into the grave, with prayers for my happiness, with the aspirations of a soul asking the divine forgiveness. But amongst the papers left me by Seymour, was one written in her own hand, which was addressed to me. Over this sacred record, I indulge at stated periods a train of bitter yet pleasing recollections, and have sometimes sat a whole day, secluded from all earthly converse, over the well-known characters traced by that departed saint. In this paper is a manifestation of her own innocence so unquestionable, that I take shame to myself for having ever called it into question. Compassion, the most god-like compassion, threw her into the arms of Seymour. She saw him sinking into an early grave, the victim of an unrequited affection. She sacrificed her own repose to preserve that of her husband's friend, when she thought that death had broken the earthly tie

of our union. To shorten my story; my father and mother had died before my arrival in England. I am now alone and unconnected; for the title and estate of my family are inherited by my brother from whom I had been separated in early life, and for whom it is not to be supposed that I can have cultivated the sympathies that, from close intercourse and connexion, grew up amongst members of the same household. I am now, therefore, desolate on the earth; disconnected from the vast multitudes that swarm on its surface. My own misfortunes, however, have not hardened me to the ills that prey upon others, and it is my occupation to relieve the necessities that beset and way-lay our wretched existence. It is a lesson I have learned from adversity, and the only enjoyment I experience consists in the practice of it."

ETYMOGRAPHY.

THE philological approximations between ideas, whatever be their expression, are never so curious as when they offer themselves in an isolated manner, without being accompanied by any medium of criticism, or any sign of their origin, and without discovering in what precedes or pleases any point of comparison. They never excite such lively interest as when we know not how to employ or avail ourselves of them, in the comparative study of tongues and ideas, or embarrassed by their very existence. In this point of view, the approximation between those ideas which are the most specific, which are necessarily those of the most vulgar order, claim more regard than those which are observed between moral ideas: the expression which, by its speciality, seems impossible to have been conceived more than once, tempts investigation when it appears in two languages, widely separated by geographical positions, and by the manners they indicate.

An expression of this nature appears in the written language of China and in a dialect of India, which may be termed the frontier of the Persian language. The right hand and the left hand are figured in the Chinese Koo-wăn by characters of the species called Hwuy-e. The analysis of these characters gives, the first, a hand lowering itself towards the character kung " labour," that is, “hand of labour, hand inclined towards labour;" the second, a hand placed upon the sign of mouth, as if to convey nourishment thither, that is, "feeding hand." This etymology, which results from the very composition of the characters, confirmed by the tradition contained in the Shuy-wăn, has its analogy in the Guzerattee. This dialect has two adverbs, the formation of which is exactly after the manner of the Chinese characters; they are, accord

ing to Mr. Drummond:* तमणे (San, तमन) हाथे ( San. हस्त), on the right hand, i. e. “ the feeding hand;" डाबे ( San. धा) हाथे

on the

left hand, i. e. "the depressed hand." As the hand which labours must almost always be depressed, this slight variety of expression is no serious difficulty.Journal Asiatique.

* Illustrations of the grammatical parts of the Guzerattee language. Bombay, 1808.

AFFINITY OF ANCIENT AND HINDU MYTHOLOGY."

THE work of Colonel Vans Kennedy, on the Nature and Affinity of the Ancient and Hindu Mythology, of which we propose to give an analysis, is well calculated by its deep research and great ingenuity to attract attention on the important subjects of early migrations and ancient mythology, and in many instances is adapted to correct some errors prevalent respecting them. The writer supposes the original seat of Indian mythology to have been Babylonia, from whence it was communicated to Asia Minor, and thence introduced by the Pelasgi in their wanderings into Thrace, Greece, Latium, and Etruria. This notion has every plausibility to recommend it; and whilst it accounts for the similarity to be observed between the opinions and customs of the Babylonians and those of remote nations, is also founded on historical fact and primitive traditions. It at the same time explains the phenomenon respecting the agreement of manners and affinity of language (though often considerably impaired by the roving lives of the tribes, who planted them in northern soils), which incontestibly prevailed between the Asiatics and Europeans, by Asia Minor affording the channel through which they passed to the Germans and Scandinavians.

There appears also to be equal correctness in his argument, that idolatry did not originate in the deification of men, and no trace of such apotheoses being discernible in Hesiod's remains, his proofs, that the practice was unknown to the earlier Greeks, are satisfactorily established. In Egypt, India, and elsewhere, it manifestly originated in the deification of the planets and elements; for as the effects of divine communications to the first ages became fainter with their descendants, they adopted, as Colonel Kennedy remarks, a sensible type of the invisible God, first the sun and fire, and afterwards extended their personifications to the other elements. The existence of female deities evinces them not to have been apotheoses of mortals, because women never attained to a sufficient consideration in the East, and long ere the idea was conceived, either as a political engine or as the incense of flattery, the pantheon was amply furnished with pre-existing gods.

From these considerations he passes to an examination of the Hindu theology. In the esoteric, the existence of a supreme being, though no external worship was paid to him, "was most carefully inculcated, and Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva were invariably represented as entirely dependent upon him, and equally subject to production and final dissolution as the meanest atom;" but "the exoteric has presented to the people for their veneration and worship an infinite number of angelic and divine beings." This, we conceive, is not only a true picture of the Hindu, but also of all antient theology in every country where the primitive idolatry acquired force; since Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, as the representatives of the Supreme Being or Ineffable Mind (whilst the sun and the moon, the personified firmament, fire, air, water, earth, to which other planets may be added, were

Researches into the Nature and Affinity of Ancient and Hindu Mythology, by LIEUT. COL. VANS KENNEDY, of the Bombay Military Establishment. London, 1831. 4to. pp. 494. Longman and Co.

deified as his agents), had analogies more or less striking in almost every part of Asia. Nor is this surprising, if the postulate, that the whole system branched off from Babylonia, be admitted. Clearly, however, as this fact appears,...a cause adequate to the solution of every effect,-it has been unaccountably overlooked by many inquirers into antient mythology, who have too often wasted both their time and learning in erecting theories at direct variance with the data presented by the nations themselves, and too often resorted to absurd and impossible etymologies, having little or no connexion with the languages of those whose theogonies and legends they have thereby sought to elucidate. Thus, one party has referred every superstition of former times to perverted recollections of the Noetic era, and another imagined Egypt to have been the cradle of idolatry. The knowledge, the antiquity, and far-spread fame of the Egyptian priesthood would naturally have allured investigators to their schools; and the statements of the Greeks and others, who actually examined their lore, as far as they would disclose it, corroborated the long-sanctioned impression, and taught both philosopher and poet to regard that favoured land as the mother of science and pupil of the gods. But much of that philosophy, which the Greeks boasted to have derived from Egypt, was, as Mr. Colebrooke has shewn, cultivated and taught in India. Hence, although we do not entirely assent to Col. Kennedy's remarks on Egypt, we feel assured that its idolatry could not have distinctly originated in the country, but must have been founded on the same causes, as in others, although it may gradually have become more complex and intricate after its establishment there. We know too little of its earliest periods, much less how far Herodotus may have authentically interpreted the sources to which he was indebted for his information, and far too little of the causes which inundated it with demigods, to elevate the Egyptian into a separate class of idolatry. Colonel Kennedy, indeed, assents to the doctrine of Cudworth and Sir Wm. Jones, that all the different deities alluded to the unseen god, under different names, and implied the powers of nature, whence among the Hindus and others we notice, in their hymns and invocations, a long list of epithets in various ways expressive of their functions or legendary actions. These, however, as he notices, are all referable but to one god, which, having been possibly forgotten by the emigrants in the course of their migrations, they in process of time were accounted distinct by the vulgar, for whom the notion of an invisible arbiter was too refined and philosophic.

There exists a great force in his arguments against the acceptation of Osiris for the sun, and in his hypothesis, that he was "one of the three principal gods into which the Egyptians believed that the Supreme Being, on willing the existence of this universe, had multiplied himself; that, in the lapse of time, his peculiar character and attributes had gradually become of a mixed and indeterminate nature, in the same manner as it has happened to those of Shiva in India." Thus, in the wives of the Egyptian gods we discern the Hindu Sactis; in Osiris and Isis (as Sir Wm. Jones discovered), "Iswara or Isa and Isani or Isi;" and in Typhon, not that evil principle which has been asserted, but the impersonification of the sea-an opinion

in Arabic.* The

stated by Plutarch and confirmed by the sense of analogy between the deities of Egypt and India has been indeed so frequently pointed out, that it is needless to extend the catalogue or to exhibit the proofs; but were we in possession of records relating to the first settlements in these countries, we should doubtless, notwithstanding the many monstrosities and incumbrances which are now presented to us, more clearly perceive the full identity of the two. Although recent discoveries in deciphering the hieroglyphics corroborate very many of the assertions of the Greeks, still, when we consider the varying and often contradictory accounts which they have given respecting Egypt, the quicquid Græcia mendax audet in historiá necessarily guards us against too implicit a belief, more especially when these accounts are repugnant to the habits and opinions which we notice in other people adopting a system of theology radically the same.

It will not, therefore, appear extraordinary that Colonel Kennedy should dispute the deduction of the Grecian gods from Egypt (the advocates of which theory can only claim the authority of a very indefinite passage in Herodotust) on grounds as strong and clear as can reasonably be offered to consideration. The passage runs thus: σχεδὸν δὲ καὶ πάντα τὰ οὐνόματα τῶν Θεῶν ἐξ ̓Αιγύπτου ἐλήλυθε ἐς τὴν ̔Ελλαδα· δίοτι μὲν γὰρ ἐκ τῶν βαρβάρων ήκει, πυνθανόμενος όντω εὑρισκω ἐδν· δοκέω δ ̓ ὧν μάλιστα ἀπ ̓ ̓Αιγύπτου ἀπίχθαι· ότι γὰρ δὴ μὴ Ποσειδέωνος καὶ Διοσκούρων καὶ Ἥρης καὶ Ιστίης καὶ Θέμιος καὶ Χαρίτων καὶ Νηρηίδων, τῶν ἄλλων Θεῶν ̓Αιγυπτίοισι αἰεὶ τότε τὰ οὐνόματα ἐστὶ ἐν τῇ χώρῃ· Λέγω δὴ τὰ λέγουσι αὐτοὶ 'AIYUATION. The first evidence arising from this quotation is, at the best, but hypothetical: Herodotus heard that the names of the gods came from the barbarians, and consequently thinks that they must have been principally derived from Egypt, because, with the exception of Neptune, the Dioscuri, Juno, Vesta, Themis, the Graces, and the Nereids, the names of the other gods had been from time immemorial in the country, which, even if admitted to be correct, will by no means prove them to have been indigenous, much less affect the position, that they were introduced by emigrants from other parts. His authority, viz. that he repeats the statements of the Egyptians themselves, can rank no higher than authority founded on the assertions of other idolaters, most of whom pretend their rites and ceremonies to have been primitively revealed to them by the Divinity.

But Colonel Kennedy attacks the inference drawn from this passage by writers on mythology still more forcibly: "it must (he says) be here particularly recollected, that this opinion relates to an occurrence which, according to the received system of chronology must have taken place about ELEVEN HUNDRED years previously to Herodotus's visiting Egypt; and that it depends entirely on verbal information, and on the resemblance, the particulars of which he does not explain, which Herodotus supposed to exist between certain deities of Egypt and Greece. But so obviously

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