disturb our neighbours' amour propre by allowing them to imagine that we do not acknowledge a prodigious superiority upon the part of their novelists, as regards the extent to which this principle has been carried out, in the two kinds of art. We readily admit that the early architects probably never dreamt of the degree of developement of which the French romancists have proved this principle to be capable. Neither would we hurt their feelings by ascribing their adoption of the principle in question to like causes. No. The France of the Revolution must not be charged with having done any kind of thing out of simpleness or reverence for authority! Young France is a "sprightly Juvenal," who will never submit to the restraint of grandmamma's apron-strings. We doubt not but that, if no other good reason could be given for the adoption of the extra-natural, or rather antinatural, principle in literature, its adoption would be regarded as sufficiently justified by the undeniable fact, that Nature now was also the Nature by which things were ordered up to '89. But the truth is, that there exist various other good reasons for the adoption of this principle. First and foremost, in a worldly point of view, is the marvellous facility of composition thereby conferred. The servile necessity of imitating Nature once in good carnest abandoned, to produce striking contrasts," "thrilling situations," and "dramatic effects," becomes "as easy as lying," which, indeed, it very much resembles; and when the invention even of the facts is assumed by the author as being among his privileges-which is the case with some of the greatest of the living novelists of France; the one under review, for example—we can conceive nothing more pleasant than must be the sense of facility wherewith the writer may be supposed to float about in the chaos which he has created anew from nature and history, juxtaposing the discordant atoms, bidding novel after novel "rise like an exhalation," and coining his francs by thousands at a sitting.

Another advantage which results from this principle, and which, we imagine, weighs scarcely less in the esteem of our admiration-loving bre

thren, is the scope that is given by it for being, or, at least, seeming, profound. Nothing is easier than to suggest the being of some marvellous purpose, nothing more difficult than to demonstrate its absence, in the coagulation of incongruous materials which the adoption of the principle in question produces. Nothing is easier than to deceive most readers into a full belief that such purpose is really perceived by them; for definite shapes are always to be imagined from an absolute confusion of shapes -from clouds and cinders, for example; finally, should some churlish peruser, always boasting of his "common-sense," 66 matter-of-fact" pro

pensities, &c., come across an organised chaos of this class, and refuse to admit the being of such purpose, nothing is easier than to assure him that wisdom has ever dwelt in a well -whose depths he, haply, is incapable of sounding.

A third advantage derivable from the employment of this principle is, the originality which it causes. Each man possesses some peculiarity by which he is distinguished from every other man. He who can make his genuine peculiarity appear in his writings is the only original writer. Now to do this, and at the same time to preserve the integrity of Nature, is extremely difficult. But abandon Nature, and that peculiarity becomes the centre around which the resulting chaos inevitably forms itself. Hence the prodigious flux of originality wherewith these romancists are inundating, astounding, and denaturalising themselves, their countrymen, and French-novel-reading Europe in general.

Much more might be affirmed in praise of this prolific principle, but our intention in writing this article was, not to review French novels and to analyse their principles in general, so much as to enable our readers to form accurate notions of French notions of" England and the English." This we have done; and in doing this we have, perhaps, proved that the assertion with which we commenced our criticism is not universally true; but that the exercise of the privilege of beholding ourselves with the eyes of others may sometimes be more pleasant than profitable.

"We think, from the striking similarity in religion and habits between the Egyptians and the Rasena, that a large colony from the city of Resen dwelt for a long time in Egypt; and that about 1260 years before Christ, or, it may be, even somewhat later, they sailed from some part of Africa to seek new homes and new fortunes in Italy. And we think, that had Herodotus written either 'Ludin' or 'Lubia,' instead of 'Ludia,' and ⚫ Syrtes' instead of Smyrna,' his account would have given the real tradition of the people. It is almost certain that Herodotus must have been told Ludin,' for the country of the Rasena, which he wrote Ludia,' because the name 'Ludin' is found upon the Egyptian monuments, as the name of a series of nations triumphed over by the Pharaohs two or three times before the days of Moses.* And as it is evident that the story of Herodotus is not Lydian, in the sense of Lydia proper, so we must suppose him to have confused the Etruscan account with the Lydian, from similarity

of names.

་

"Concerning the events of a very remote period of ancient history, recorded by no authentic annals, and conjectured rather than traced through the mazes of the wanderings of a mysterious people, discretion forbids us to assume the tone of positive assertion. We trust, however, that in the foregoing, as well as subsequent pages, hypothesis will be admitted to have assumed the garb of probability, and that we are neither deceiv. ing ourselves nor misleading our readers when we believe that we can point out the true source of that wonderful race, to whom Europe owes so much and has acknowledged so little. We think that we can discern them, a stately band, issuing from beneath the lofty gateways of the high-walled and proudly-towered Resen, that great city, as ancient as Memphis and Zoan. Thence we follow them to the banks of the Nile, and behold them mingling in fellowship with the victorious Assyrians, and with the seed of Israel, in the fertile nomes of Lower Egypt, until at length the avenging arm of the legitimate Pharaoh de

* Vide Rosellini, M. Storici, vol. iii,

livered his country from Asiatic oppression, and drove the men of Resen to seek for settlements elsewhere. After their second exile we trace them to a welcome Italian home, whither they brought the arts, the arms, the luxuries, and the sciences, which they had originally possessed in Ludin, and on which they had engrafted the learning of the wisest of nations. Here they become dominant lords and beneficent victors, conquering, civilising, and blessing the ruder people of the west; until the mysterious times of their dominion being ended, and the sand of their promised ages of glory having run, they sunk into the subordi nate state of a conquered nation, and were soon absorbed in the all-engrossing 'Senatus Populusque Romanus.""

We would not willingly be guilty of an incivility to so accomplished and excellent a person as Mrs. Gray, but we must say, in despite of the gallantry due to her sex, that this extraordinary theory bids defiance to the gravity of criticism altogether. It is true that, in the tenth chapter of Genesis, mention is made of a city in Mesopotamia, called Resen in our translation, and written Rsn in the Hebrew text; but, except in the accidental resemblance of that term to the word Rasena, mentioned by Dionysius Halicarnassus, there is not one single circumstance that we know of, or can imagine, which could warrant the identification of that Assyrian city and its inhabitants with the progenitors of the Italian Etruscans, or Rasenes, and the country which they occupied in the west. Neither history nor tradition make mention of such a connexion, and if it should turn out, as has been often conjectured, that Rasena is the error of a copyist, and that it should have been written Trsena, the whole edifice falls to the ground, and we get the classic Tyrseni, or Tyrrheni, for the semi-barbarous appellation, Rasena. We incline, however, to the opinion that there is no mistake as to this word, but that Dionysius wrote it correctly as a strange and foreign vocable; and we ground this belief, partly on the well-known care which that writer bestowed on such minute points, and partly on the fact that ena, or enna, was a masculine Etrurian termination, and is

+ Vol. i. pp. 11 et seq.

preserved in the names of men about whose existence there can be no doubt: such as Porsenna, Vibenna, Perpenna, and the like.* Where the Romans used ius in gentile names, the Etrurians used na. We may, therefore, accept the word Rasena as a part of the nearly forgotten archæological vocabulary of Etruria in the age of Dionysius, without resorting to the singular fancy that it is but a various reading of the Hebrew Resen: but whether we do so or not, we are certainly entitled to ask for more solid proofs of the descent of the Etrurians suggested by Mrs. Gray than it is possible for ordinary ingenuity to extract from the casual similarity in sound and look of two obscure and unintelligible words, which are only once met with in the works from which they are borrowed. The question of the eastern origin of that mysterious people is not in the slightest degree affected by any conclusion that we may come to respecting this particular hypothesis, which must stand or fall by its own weight; but as it is founded on an assumption of a novel kind, we shall endeavour to ascertain, before proceeding farther, what is really known, or conjectured, regarding the city called Resen in the Scripture.

It would appear, then, that in the days of Moses, about 1470 years before Christ, Resen still existed, and was entitled from its magnitude to the appellation of "a great city;" and this is all that the Hebrew historian says about it. It lay on the Tigris, and, as the account in Genesis indicates, nearer the source of that stream than Nineveh, and, apparently, on a branch of the Leck,t which, rising in the Carduchian mountains, joins the Tigris in its course downwards. It was situated in the district of Aturia, and in the region called Assyria. The chronological question involved in this statement we are not concerned with at present, but we incline to the

*Niebuhr, vol. i. p. 381.

opinion of Sir William Drummond, that the period of a hundred years after the flood usually assigned for the date of its foundation must be greatly enlarged, and that it may be so without any impeachment of the accuracy of the sacred penman. He supposes Nimrod to have been, not literally the son, but only the descendant of Cush, the grandson of Noah, and to have been contemporary with Abraham, whose call he places at 1067 years after the deluge, instead of 427, which is the vulgar reckoning; and it would appear to us as if the physical condition of the globe, and other considerations essential to the right understanding of so brief a narrative, would demand this temporal augment.

This is all that is recorded of the city of Resen, and it is little enough; but an accidental circumstance, to which we must now advert, has brought it within the circle of critical discussion, and partially rescued it from the obscurity to which it was condemned. Xenophon, in his Anabasis, mentions that the Greeks, in their retreat, came to a city on the Tigris, called Larissa.§ It was large, but deserted, and of old had been inhabited by the Medes, who were dispossessed at the time of the Persian conquest. Its walls were twentyfive feet broad, and a hundred high, and their circumference was seven miles and a half.||_Surprised to find a city with a Greek name in so unnatural a locality, and puzzled by so unlooked-for an occurrence, the celebrated Bochart tried to remove the difficulty by a conjecture. He began by supposing that this Larissa of Xenophon's may have been the Resen of Moses; not that Xenophon says, or could have said, anything to warrant so bold an assumption, bat that it gave him an opportunity of exhibiting that marvellous skill in etymology for which he was distinguished. His next step was to allege, that to the inquiries of the Greeks about the ruins, the Assyri

Lib. iii. cap. 4.

ans may have answered LRSN, or, by adding le, the mark of the genitive, Laresen, which, in Greek orthography, would become Larissan.* It would thus seem that we are indebted to a mere fancy of Bochart's for the revival of the name of a Mesopotamian city, which is to be found nowhere but in Genesis, and for the enlargement of this notion by Mrs. Gray, who, naturally enough, perhaps, seized upon this piece of criticism as confirmatory of the peculiar origin which she would assign to the Etrurian people. What the real name of the city described by Xenophon may have been it is impossible to determine, but we may be tolerably sure that it was not Larissa. The Greeks were notorious for their corruptions of both national and individual appellations, and it is to the last degree improbable that in a country subject, above all others, to rapid and desolating revolutions, the Resen of Moses, which was neither the metropolis of a kingdom nor the capital of a province, should have been distinguishable, by name or otherwise, at least a thousand years after the Pentateuch was compiled. It was, or had been, a Median city when Xenophon visited it; and doubtless its name bore some resemblance to Larissa, an urban designation with which the historian was familiar. There were at least five Larissas in Asiatic and peninsular Greece; it was essentially a Greek word, and as no Greek cities are known to have existed in Assyria till after the time of Alexander the Great, we may safely dismiss Bochart's conjecture, which rested on convenience alone, and which has had the unhappy effect of misleading others as well as Mrs. Gray. But were it otherwise, and did we consent to receive this critical emendation as the expression of a fact, how would that concession affect the question at issue? We may not doubt that, at

a very remote period in the history of the world, there was a city of considerable importance on the banks of the Tigris called Resen, and were we to grant for the sake of argument that it was the same with that mentioned by Xenophon, there would still remain an immense gulf to be filled up, and for which operation history has provided us with no materials, before we could transport its unknown inhabitants, under the title of Rasenes, from the valley of the Euphrates to the plains and seacoasts of Italy. This vast leap, however, Mrs. Gray is not afraid to take; and in the passage which we have given she indicates how this extraordinary transportation may have been effected. Let us try, then, whether we can successfully follow this adventurous lady.

men

A remarkable people are tioned in history by the title of Hyksos, or Royal Shepherds. Every thing connected with their origin is obscure and unsatisfactory; but the most probable conjecture is, that they were a nomad pastoral tribe, most likely Arabs, who, in their wanderings, had transgressed their own bounds, and had invaded and subdued Egypt. The little that is known concerning them is derived from the fragments of Manetho (B.c. 261) preserved by Josephus. This people, under six different kings, had the military occupation of Egypt, for it was no more, for 260 years, when they were expelled by a revolt of the Egyptians, and the native dynasty restored. Their name, according to Manetho, is compounded of two words, the first of which, Hyk, or "TK, in the sacred dialectἵεραν γλώσσαν, i.e. the Chaldee, signified royal; and the second, Sōs, or so, in the common dialect- —κοινον διαλεκτον—a shepherd. A nearly similar derivation is given by Eusebius (fourth century), who assigns both the words to the sacred tongue; while Bryant

Bryant, vol. vi. p. 108.

VOL. XXXIV. NO. CCIY.

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