nay, it is probably in the very infancy of its existence, only in the outset of its career, and the generations whom it has delighted are as nothing compared to those whom it is destined to charm in its future progress to eternity. Contrast this majestic and immortal fate with that of the evanescent dust and clay, the poor perishing frame whose organization gave it birth; and what an additional argument does it afford, that the soul capable of such sublime efforts cannot be intended to revert to the earth with its miserable tegument of flesh. That which could produce immortality may well aspire to its enjoyment.

Ah! if the "learned Thebans," of whom we have made mention, had thought of embalming their minds instead of their bodies; if they had committed their intellect to paper, instead of their limbs to linen; and come down to us bound up in vellum with a steel clasp, instead of being coffined up in sycamore with an iron screw, how much more perfect would have been the posthumous preservation, and how much more delightful to the literary world to have possessed an epic Thebaid from an ancient Theban, than from so affected and turgid a Roman as Statius! Let us not, however, despair. A portion of the very poem of Homer which has elicited these remarks, has lately been discovered in the enveloping folds of a mummy; and who shall say that we may not hereafter unravel the verses of some Memphian bard, who has been taking a nap of two or three thousand years in the catacombs of Luxor? M. Denon maintains that almost all the learning, and nearly all the arts, of mo

dern Europe, were known to the ancient Egyptians; and as a partial confirmation of this theory, I may here mention, that on the interior case of a mummy-chest there was lately found a plate of crystallised metal resembling tin, although that art has only been recently and accidentally discovered in England. So true is it that there is nothing new which has not once been old.

What laborious days, what watchings by the midnight lamp, what rackings of the brain, what hopes and fears, what long lives of laborious study, are here sublimized into print, and condensed into the narrow compass of these surrounding shelves! What an epitome of the past world, and how capricious the fate by which some of them have been preserved, while others of greater value have perished! The monks of the middle ages, being the great medium of conservation, and outraged nature inciting them to avenge the mortification of the body by the pruriousness of the mind, the amatory poets have not only come down to us tolerably entire, but they "have added fat pollutions of their own," passing off their lascivious elegies as the production of Cornelius Gallus, or anonymously sending forth into the world still more licentious and gross erotics. Some of the richest treasures of antiquity have been redeemed from the dust and cobwebs of monastical libraries, lumberrooms, sacristies, and cellars; others have been excavated in iron chests, or disinterred from beneath ponderous tomes of controversial divinity, or copied from the backs of homilies and sermons, with which,

in the scarcity of parchment, they had been over-written. If some of our multitudinous writers would compile a circumstantial account of the resurrection of every classical author, and a minute narrative of the discovery of every celebrated piece of ancient sculpture, what an interesting volume might be formed!

Numerous as they are, what are the books preserved in comparison with those that we have lost? The dead races of mankind scarcely outnumber the existing generation more prodigiously than do the books that have perished exceed those that remain to us. Men are naturally scribblers, and there has probably prevailed, in all ages since the invention of letters, a much more extensive literature than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Osymandias, the ancient King of Egypt, if Herodotus may be credited, built a library in his palace, over the door of which was the well known inscription-" Physic for the Soul." Job wishes that his adversary had written a book, probably for the consolation of cutting it up in some Quarterly or Jerusalem Review; the expression, at all events, indicates a greater activity "in the Row" than we are apt to ascribe to those primitive times. Allusion is also made in the Scriptures, to the library of the Kings of Persia, as well as to one built by Nehemiah. Ptolemy Philadelphus had a collection of 700,000 volumes destroyed by Cæsar's soldiers; and the Alexandrian Library, burnt by the Caliph Omar, contained 400,000 manuscripts. What a combustion of congregated brains!—the quintessence of ages-the wisdom of a world-all simulta

neously converted into smoke and ashes! This, as Cowley would have said, is to put out the fire of genius by that of the torch; to extinguish the light of reason in that of its own funeral pyre; to make matter once more triumph over mind. Possibly, however, our loss is rather imaginary than real, greater in quantity than in quality. Men's intellects, like their frames, continue pretty much the same in all ages, and the human faculty, limited in its sphere of action, and operating always upon the same materials, soon arrives at an impassable acme which leaves us nothing to do but to ring the changes upon antiquity. Half our epic poems are modifications of Homer, though none are equal to that primitive model; our Ovidian elegies, our Pindarics, and our Anacreontics, all resemble their first parents in features as well as in name. Fertilizing our minds with the brains of our predecessors, we raise new crops of the old grain, and. pass away to manure the intellectual field for future harvests of the same description. Destruction and reproduction is the system of the moral as well as of the physical world.

An anonymous book loses half its interest; it is the voice of the invisible, an echo from the clouds, the shadow of an unknown substance, an abstraction devoid of all humanity. One likes to hunt out an author, if he be dead, in obituaries and biographical dictionaries; to chase him from his birth; to be in at his death, and learn what other offspring of his brain survive him. Even an assumed name is better than none; though it is clearly a nominal fraud, a deser

tion from our own to enlist into another identity. It may be doubted whether we have any natural right thus to leap down the throat, as it were, of an imaginary personage, and pass off a counterfeit of our own creation for genuine coinage. But the strongest semi-vitality, or zoophite state of existence, is that of the writers of Ephemerides, who squeeze the whole bulk of their individuality into the narrow compass of a single consonant or vowel; who have an alphabious being as Mr. A., a liquid celebrity under the initial of L., or attain an immortality of zig-zag under the signature of Z. How fantastical to be personally known as an impersonal, to be literally a man of letters, to have all our virtues and talents entrusted to one little hieroglyphic, like the bottles in the apothecary's shop. Compared to this ignoble imprisonment, how light the punishment of the negligent Sylph, who was threatened to

Be stopp'd in vials, or transfix'd with pins,
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,

Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye;

Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,

While, clogg'd, he beats his silken wings in vain.

So gross are my perceptions, that my mind refuses to take cognizance of these Magazine sprites, in their alphabetical and shadowy state. I animate these monthly apparitions, put flesh and blood around the bones of their letters, and even carry my humanity so far as to array them in appropriate garments. I have an ideal (not always a beau ideal) of every one of the contributors to the New Monthly, as accurate, no