CHAPTER XIII.

COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AND RECENT DISCOVERIES.

The Etruscans, &c.-Ancient Inscriptions-Bunsen and Egypt-Niebuhr and Rome.

THUS history furnishes no clue to the early times of many a race of the earth, whose blood still flows in the veins of powerful nations. The origin of the Etruscans, represented by the Florentines of our day, is shrouded in almost impenetrable mystery. Of the Pelasgians, we only know that their language, differing from the Greek, was spoken at Khreston and at Platæa, but the genius of men like Thirwall, Grote, Niebuhr, and Müller has tried in vain to trace them back to their earlier history. Neither the Cimmerii of the fourth century before Christ, nor the Huns of the fifth century of our era have yet found their proper place among the races of our globe. The inhabitants of Southern and Central America, the natives of San Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica are a riddle to the ethnologist, and surmises innumerable have been ventured to explain the origin of North American Indians. We know but just enough of the latter to encourage the hope that in their language we may find a clue to the manner in which these rapidly disappearing representatives of a once all-powerful race probably passed from Eastern Asia, from Kamskatka to the

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Aleutian chain, and thence by Aliaska to their present habitation. In the same way, it is believed, we may, through the idioms spoken in Eastern India, find an explanation of the striking differences existing among the natives there, who vary as much in color as in language, and whose history is as yet perfectly unknown.

It is one of Bunsen's beautiful thoughts, that inscriptions like those of Babylon, Nineveh, and Persepolis, have been preserved under the protecting veil of the earth, until the auspicious time when the unparalleled success of modern investigators like Burnouf, Lassen, Wilson, Rawlinson, Hincks, and Benfey, would enable us to read in the arrows and wedges of these monuments the history of nations flourishing in Asia at a time when Europe was inhabited by painted and tattooed savages. The ingenious methods by which modern Science has been able to treat the forms and roots, the grammatical conjunction, and the very spirit of a language, as so many historical monuments exhibiting the mental development of extinct, or but recently discovered. nations, have led to most astonishing results. Such are the important revelations obtained in the East which fill the mind with wonder at the antiquity of the unveiled knowledge, and with admiration of the skill that brought them to light. Such is the light thrown by Layard and others on the most remote history of Asiatic realms, and the marvellous confirmation of the records of Holy Writ by those inscriptions. Such is the re-. markable success which rewarded the labors of Bunsen in his Egyptian researches, and first led us to consider the Egyptian tongue not only as a language which represents the primeval history of that land of mystery, but as the only known historical

monument of the earlier period of the human race, a thousand years before Moses, and therefore the only record of the language and civilization of primitive Central Asia.

Another instance of the power of language to throw light on times of comparative darkness and on periods of which all records are lost, is the admirable use which Niebuhr has made of a few fragments of ancient Italian idioms, for the purpose of restoring, by such means, their birthright to the earliest inhabitants of Italy. Not even tradition, fable, or myth, knows any thing of the time before the foundations of ancient Rome were laid; Romulus and Remus themselves are threatened with the fate of similar historical personages, and sent, with Hengist and Horsa, into the land of myths. But modern researches have brought to light ancient inscriptions written in a language far older than all historical records, older, probably, than tradition itself. By the indefatigable industry and brilliant genius of modern philologists, the language of these monuments has been studied, analyzed, philosophically investigated, and, finally, traced to the far East, to that distant and mysterious cradle of Indo-European languages, and their long-forgotten and lost mother tongue. In all features of this oldest Latin, Philology has distinctly seen and clearly demonstrated this first descent and relationship; Latin has been proved to be older than Greek, instead of being derived from it, as heretofore scholars even firmly believed. Additional researches furnished new light, until finally enough was obtained to refute and annihilate every argument in favor of the descent of Latin from Greek, through the Æolic, or of its being the result of a mixture of Celtic and Greek, as even Niebuhr still believed. The Umbrian and the Oscan were found

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to be as old as the Latin itself; and the Etruscan, of which every trace seemed to have been lost, saw its claims of kindred with the native tongues of Italy, strengthened and substantiated. Thus old errors were set aside, and truth was established or confirmed.

CHAPTER XIV.

LANGUAGES AND NATIONAL CHARACTER.

Latin and Rome-Suetonius and P iny-Language and the National Intellect.

DIGGING in this laborious but profitable manner through the accumulated rubbish of centuries, the analytical comparison of languages has not only rendered important aid in the exploration of times of remote antiquity, but it has also furnished the historian with new testimony for more recent epochs. Treating the language of a people as the embodiment and full expression of its spiritual life, and tracing, to the minutest detail, the manner in which the various mental qualities and moral instincts of a race would naturally give a peculiar cast to their idiom, Comparative Philology successfully reads in the history. of a language the history of the people by whom it was or is now used. Each great event, each new effort towards progress, is clearly legible in their idiom. What light has not, in this way, been thrown on the character of the Roman, since the history of the Roman language has become better known? The diffusion of his highly endowed idiom, possessing rich literary trea

sures, and borne on the wings of triumph and victory, is now seen to have been one of the great means employed by Divine Providence in uniting and binding together the various races of Europe. Pliny already observes its power "to make man human, and to give him a common country," and ever since Latin was first spoken on Italian soil, it has been the representative of Roman virtue and Roman grandeur. A young and vigorous dialect, it overcame easily the other dialects of the peninsula. Some of them as old, some even older than their formidable rival, they quickly succumbed and disappeared from the paternal soil, leaving neither a literature nor a history, scarcely a mere memorial of their former existence. The same success accompanied the Latin in its progress beyond the natural limits of the Alps and the Pyrenees; the Celtic, the Basque, and the Albanese were driven into the farthest corners of the provinces, and rapidly conquered. Only when it met with equal or superior intellectual cultivation, the Latin permitted itself to be amalgamated with other idioms; for it could conquer nations, but not minds. Already Suetonius mentions the bold and independent words of Atteius Capito, who told Tiberius that "he might give citizenship to men, but could not give equal rights to words." Thus, in refined Greece and her colonies, Latin, though the language of the Conqueror, remained for ever a stranger, who had come too late and found no home; whilst in Northern Germany, and in the East among the Slaves, whom Herodotus called Şarmatæ, and places on the banks of the Don near the Caspian Sea, this plant of Italy, accustomed to a milder climate, could not take root, and left the rugged soil which the Roman eagles had conquered, to a later and hardier vegetation.