My Library

Louvre, not for the first time, however, but for, perhaps, the tenth. On each of these occasions my time had been mainly spent in admiring and examining the contents of the Galleries Assyrienne and Egyptienne. The bas-reliefs, or coarse engravings rather, had commanded my attention on previous occasions, along with the sphinxes of Rhampses and Menepthah, as well as the curious statues of Amenophis, Sevekhatep, Osiris, and Seti, from all of which I had learned much of that strange civilization of the long-agone, usually assigned to the past four thousand five hundred years, but which had in reality utterly perished from off the earth at least ten thousand years earlier than the first year of that date! for, but a little while before I saw those statues Mariette had exhumed from the sands of Egypt, the celebrated sarcophagi and mummy, to which the best Egyptologers, including the Chevalier Bunsen, had, with one voice, assigned an age of not less than twelve thousand years. “On this visit I stood rapt in wonder and conjecture before the cuneiform inscriptions upon a series of tablets, and which archæology has never yet interpreted—Bunsen, Layard, Botta, and Champollion having all alike failed in the attempt. “During the five or six last visits to the museum, I had observed near me, apparently engaged in the same work as myself—the attempt to cypher