found carved upon Egyptian obelisks, resemble the designs which were used to record events or give information among the Mexicans and Peruvians. The ten commandments are said in the scripture to have been engraved on tables of stone, fifteen centuries before Christ. But this art was not very widely practised among the partially civilized nations of antiquity, for we read of Homer's verses being recited or sung in Greece, and not written, six hundred years after Moses.

3. It is believed that the Phoenicians first practised writing, and introduced it to the countries whither they sent ships and colonies.

"Phoenicians first, if ancient fame be true,
The sacred mystery of letters knew ;
They first by sound in various lines designed,
Exprest the meaning of the thinking mind.
The power of words by figures rude conveyed,
And useful science everlasting made.

Then Memphis, ere the reedy leaf was known,
Engrav'd her precepts and her arts in stone;
While animals in various order placed
The learned hieroglyphic column graced.

Rowe's Lucan.

Memphis, a city of middle Egypt.

The reedy leaf. The reed papyrus, a native of Egypt, was made smooth, and sufficiently stiff, and then, being interlaced, served the Egpytians for paper.

4. The first compositions of every people are a species of rude poetry, either devotional or he roic-hymns celebrating the gods, or the deliverers of the people. But without letters, the poets were obliged to recite their verses, and they some

times adapted their songs to musical instruments. Milton speaks of music, "married to immortal verse," he means the union of music and poetry in an early stage of human society.

5. There is no class of men which enjoys the same honour from their fellow creatures as fine writers. It is the pride of the cultivated and the rich to celebrate them; and it is the comfort of the afflicted, the solace of the obscure, and the light of the ignorant, to make friends with those who are incapable of coldness, of suspicion, and of injustice; who are good for instruction and reproof, and in whom there is neither variableness nor turning.

"Who speak to subjects what they speak to kings, Nor tell to various people, various things."

6. The bards of Greece, the scalds of Scandinavia, and the minstrels of southern Europe, were honoured and cherished in their several countries before letters were known. Homer says, that though the men of his age exalted their artists, their priests, and physicians, they respected their poets still more.

"Round the wide world are called hose men divine
Who public structures raise, and who design.
Those to whose eyes the gods their ways reveal,
Or bless with salutary arts to heal;
But chief to poets such respect belongs,
By rival nations courted for their songs.
These, states invite and mighty kings admire,
Far as the sun displays his vital fire."

Odyssey, Book XVII.

HOMER.

Writers are not precisely agreed in respect to the time in which Homer lived. The place of his birth is not ascertained, neither is any thing positively known of his mode of life. Different cities contended for the honour of giving him birth. Mrs. Barbauld in a pretty dream of her invention, describes Homer as passing by her, and when she enquired the place of his birth, he only replied, " Guess !" This expresses what we must all do

who are curious about this fact.

2. Milton calls him, "blind Mæonides," which signifies son of Mæon, or native of Mæouia, of Asia Minor. But this is the license of a poet. The propriety of the appellation is as doubtful as the fact of the blindness which is often ascribed to him. Others have asserted that he was a beggar. The author of some verses to an Egyptian mummy, supposes that the hand of the mummy might have "dropped a half-penny in Homer's hat," when he asked charity.

3. All that we, who are not professed scholars of critics, know of Homer, is, that he is a Greek poet of great antiquity, often called the father of poetry; that the Epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey are imputed to him; that we are made acquainted with these in our English language, by means of two well known translations-those of Pope and Cow. per; and we know that Pope's translations of Homer are very generally read.

4. The Iliad commences at the middle of the story, so that without preparatory information, a young person does not readily comprehend it. The

subject of the Iliad is the anger of Achilles, a Grecian prince, engaged in the siege of Troy. In modern geography, the site, or spot upon which ancient Troy stood, is not accurately determined, but the ancient maps describe Troy, Troja or Ilion, as a city of Phrygia, in Asia Minor, at a short distance from the Strait of the Hellespont. The Simois, and Scamander, were two little rivers that watered this city. The island of Tenedos lay near it in the Egean sea, and inland, not far from it, was Mount Ida.

5. The name Iliad is derived from Ilion. The fable of the Trojan war is this. Priam the king of Troy, had many children. It was foretold by a soothsayer, that the last-born of his family should be the destruction of Troy; and the parents, accordingly, ordered their infant to be destroyed as soon as it was born. The humane slave, to whom this painful office was assigned, could not perform it, but left the child near Mount Ida, where he was found by some shepherds, who bred him up.

6. As Paris, (that was the name given to the foundling) was tending his flocks upon Mount Ida, three goddesses, Minerva, Juno, and Venus, presented themselves before him. These goddesses were attending a marriage, when the goddess Discord came among them, and threw into the place where they were, a golden apple, inscribed, "To the fairest." The goddesses each claimed the apple, and neither being willing to give up her claim to pre-eminent beauty, they agreed to abide by the judgment of the shepherd of Mount Ida.

7. Minerva, the "martial maid," offered Paris military glory; Juno, the queen of heaven, promised him the government of a city; and

sea

born Venus," declared she would give him the most beautiful woman in the world; each offering her gift upon condition that Paris would pronounce her to be the most beautiful. The judgment of Paris was in favour of Venus. She took the prize of beauty, and sent Paris to the court of Menelaus, king of Sparta, where Helen, the wife of the king, was to be the prize awarded to him. Without any respect to her husband, Helen attached herself to Paris, and accompanied him to Troy.

8. Helen and Clytemnestra were sisters, and married to the Atridæ. Helen to Menelaus, and Clytemnestra to his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycena. Before Helen's marriage with Menelaus, Theseus, the Athenian had carried her off, but she was rescued, and her numerous lovers, the princes of Greece, vowed, if she should ever again be thus forced away, they would unite to recover her. Upon the flight of Helen with Paris, Menelaus demanded of the princes to fulfil the engagement they had entered into.

9. Honour, "the law of kings," or perhaps eagerness for military enterprises, readily determined them to abide by their former agreement. They armed themselves, and a host of soldiers, supposed to amount altogether, to a hundred thousand men, and having crossed the Egean sea, assaulted the walls of Troy.

10. The second book of the Iliad, in the catalogue of the ships, recounts these armies, with "their climes, their names, their numbers and their chiefs. Troy was a walled city, defended by the valour of its native princes and their allies, the neighbouring kings, so that the Greeks found it no easy conquest. The narrative of the Iliad com