the American amendment, who would have been shut out by the original British propositions; and in how few years, short as is a sailor's life, must every naturalized British seaman have disappeared from the service of the United States!

We readily admit, that, in the present state of the world, it is very important that civilized nations should endeavour to approximate within reasonable limits the rules by which allegiance is created, suspended, or determined. In the meantime, every country is entitled to use its own discretion how far it will loose its hold on its own citizens. An English merchant is allowed during war, by domicile within a neutral territory, to put on the character of a neutral. The claim of an English sailor to serve on board a neutral vessel, would be no greater inconsistency with, or limitation of, the old common law doctrine, that no one can lay aside his allegiance. However, any modification of our general doctrine of allegiance, or any emancipation of the English seaman from the specific liabilities to which he is at present bound by the unjust anomaly of the English law against him, is a strictly municipal question, to be discussed between the English people and their legislature alone. At the same time it is clear, from a hundred reasons, that by far the most satisfactory way in which impressment from American vessels could possibly be set at rest, would be by putting an end to domestic impressment from our own. The British sailor ought to be placed on a level with his fellow-subjects. The time is, we hope, arrived when justice will be done to the arguments in his behalf which have been already stated in this Journal, (No. 81, p. 154.) The shipowners of London, in 1818, condemned the practice of impressment; and other officers, besides Sir Murray Maxwell, have long and zealously laboured for its abolition. In the meantime-admitting that, as against the British sailor, England has a legal right to his services independent of contract, wherever he may be found at presentyet it is a right which, as against other countries, can be only exercised in subordination to their independence and their ho nour. The greater the probability that America is getting up a schedule of unreasonable demands against us, the greater the propriety of our conceding, before that evil day, such demands as she is now preferring, which are really backed by reason. It is evident, from the allegations proved by Mr Rush on the authority of English documents, that the right cannot be enforced against American vessels, except under circumstances of unavoidable irritation, and of still more gross and unavoidable injustice.

A ship at sea is part of the soil of the country to which it

belongs. To this principle a single exception has been admitted. The exception is limited within the purposes to which a ship from its movable character may be abused. Beyond that, the ship of a nation is as inviolable as its soil. The right of a belligerent to enter a neutral vessel, and search for contraband of war, has no connexion with the right to enter and search for men. The ordering up an American crew, on an American deck, by an English lieutenant, cannot be a peaceable operation; especially where a mistake is so easily made, and where, when once made, it is so revolting in itself, and so fatal in its consequences. In point of fact, it turns out that the number of British seamen whom we have thus regained, falls far short of the number of Americans whom we have wrongfully carried off. Our newspapers would have gladly gone to war for Ambrister and Arbuthnot, two British subjects, executed by General Jackson. Yet they were but two men-wrong doers, and clearly amenable to the law by which they suffered. On the other hand, the two lists made out in 1801 and 1812 of impressed Americans, can be but a small part of the American case against us. From that fraction of their case we may, however, form some opinion on the extent to which freemen who would be a scandal to their English ancestry, unless liberty was as dear as life, must have writhed under our practice of impressment. Prior to September, 1801, eleven hundred and thirty-two native American sailors were set at liberty by the English government, as having been wrongfully impressed! On the war with America in 1812, another division of fourteen hundred and twenty-two native Americans, every one of them having been so taken, were transferred out of our men of war into our prisons! This is proved from English documents. Here are nearly two thousand six hundred sufferers,-victims of a greater outrage than one free nation ever assumed the privilege of inflicting on another;-an outrage which no nation, deserving the name of a nation, and solemnly bound to protect its meanest members, can be expected patiently to endure. The temptation to all this wrong is too trivial to be mentioned. It exists only during war. At that period the number of foreigners in the American navy is, we believe, infinitely less than in our own, where (as we then suspend the navigation acts) it has been calculated at a third of the whole. The crew of the Franklin, which brought over Mr Rush, amounted to seven hundred men. The London prints would have it that a third of them were Englishmen. In point of fact twenty-five only were foreigners; and of the twenty-five, half belonged to other parts of Europe.

Mr Rush ends the narrative of his unsuccessful negotiation on

this subject as follows: 'I look back with unfeigned regret, on the failure it records. Perhaps I may be wrong, for I speak 'from no authority, but I am not able to divest myself of an im'pression that, had Lord Castlereagh been in London, there 'would not have been a failure. I am aware that he was kept informed of the progress of the negotiation. We had reason to believe that the documents were regularly sent on for his in"spection. Still, he could not share in the full spirit of all that 'passed. He had the European relations of Britain in his hands. Impressment, although in truth a primary concern, could not, ' at such a season, have commanded all his thoughts. But I know 'how anxiously he entered into it before his departure for Aixla-Chapelle. He saw that the great principle of adjustment had at last been settled; and I can scarcely think that he would ' have allowed it to be foiled, by carrying too much rigour into ' details. It is no part of my present purpose to draw the cha'racter of Lord Castlereagh in his connexion with England, or Europe; but there was this in him, which his opponents did not deny, and history will award-an entire fearlessness. He 'knew that a treaty relinquishing impressment, no matter what 'the terms, would excite clamour in England, come when it would. But having made up his mind to the justice and po'licy of such a treaty, he would have faced the clamour.'-Pp. 375-6.

We trust that our present Ministers are prepared to take up, while peace allows us an honourable opportunity for doing so, this most important question. Our Government, in 1803, had proposed to Mr King to restrict the exercise of impressment within the narrow seas. But the Cabinet of Lord Castlereagh went the true way to work. The right of impressment, it was agreed, should be abandoned altogether. Lord Grey ought not to be left behind by Lord Castlereagh in statesmanlike forethought against future evils; in the exercise of considerate feelings towards America; or in the public spirit which has the courage to denounce the impolicy and injustice of an exceptive system, sanctioned by domestic prejudices alone. When policy, humanity, and justice, have one and all concurred thoroughly upon the principle, it is worse than folly to imagine that there can be any insuperable obstacles in the details.

ART. X.-Examen Critique des Travaux de feu M. Champollion sur les Hieroglyphes, par J. KLAPROTH. 8vo. Paris: 1832.

THIS is precisely the kind of book which, for some years past, we have wished to see. It is high time, indeed, that the public mind were disabused of those extravagant notions with which the enthusiasm of some, and the ignorance of others, have filled it on the subject of Egyptian literature; and that a measure or standard were established, by which the degree of progress that has hitherto been made in deciphering the graphic monuments of Egypt may be ascertained and fixed. And this is the more necessary, because, in various ways, expectations have been raised which, in all probability, will never be gratified, and promises held out which no human sagacity will ever be able to redeem. In entering upon a new field of investigation and discovery, men of sanguine temperament are too apt to conclude que ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute; that the chief difficulty lies at the threshold; and that to force a passage through the outward barrier is in effect to gain the victory. But, ere long, experience comes to correct so hasty a conclusion, and to convince us that the hardest part of the task yet remains to be accomplished.

The object which Mr Klaproth has proposed to himself, is to dispel the delusions which so generally prevail in regard to the capabilities of the Phonetic Method of interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics; to show what has, and what has not, been effected by means of it; to estimate the precise amount and value of the labours of M. Champollion in this new and intricate field of enquiry; and to separate the grain from the chaff in which it has been buried. And this he has accomplished in a manner at once so masterly and so complete, that little or nothing will remain to be gleaned after so skilful a reaper. His work, indeed, is perhaps unrivalled for the perfect mastery of the subject which it displays, and the rare combination of learning and sagacity with which every branch of it is successively examined or illustrated; and though by some it will perhaps be considered as severe, yet candour compels us to acknowledge that its severity consists solely in its truth. The lofty pretensions of M. Champollion have no doubt been pruned down by an unsparing hand, and his claims as a discoverer reduced to very moderate dimensions; but it would, nevertheless, be a great error to imagine that Mr Klaproth has been actuated by a desire to detract from his real merits; or has, in any instance, denied or withheld

the credit which is fairly due to him for his indefatigable, though often ill-directed exertions. Every candid and impartial man, capable of judging of the question at issue, must indeed admit that it would be unjust to require of him, who had been principally instrumental in detecting the alphabetical portion of an unknown and fantastical method of writing, employed to reproduce in part a language of which the fragments only survive in another tongue, itself almost lost, that he should read the monuments, written in this extraordinary fashion, with the same facility as the Gazette de France, or a vaudeville by M. Scribe. All those who have engaged in similar pursuits must know well the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of making rapid and striking advances; that, on the contrary, discoverers can only proceed step by step, encountering at each move new questions which require solution, and finding that every successive discovery renders it necessary to engage in researches which were not previously contemplated. The ignorant alone can imagine, therefore, that, in discovering the phonetic alphabet of the ancient writing of Egypt, M. Champollion had, by this first success, acquired the means or the power of deciphering the contents of the hieroglyphic inscriptions and monuments. The publication of his promised Grammaire Hieroglyphique, will no doubt instruct us how far he had advanced at the period of his death; but we are much mistaken, if it be not ultimately found that he had generalized much too soon, and that the powers of the instrument on which he chiefly relied for success are far more limited, or, at all events, far less extensively applicable, than he was willing to believe.

Whilst so many have of late years been accustomed to speak and write with enthusiasm concerning the discovery of the phonetic alphabet, few seem to have acquired any distinct idea of what it really is, or of the precise results to which it has led. The late Dr Thomas Young was, beyond all dispute, the original author of this discovery. So long ago as the year 1814, he had, by a simple but ingenious process, ascertained the approximate values of certain groups of characters in the Rosetta inscription; and, about the year 1818, he discovered the alphabetic value of the greater part of the hieroglyphic signs, composing the names of Ptolemy and Berenice; amongst which were very exactly determined seven characters, corresponding to the letters B, F, I, M, N, P, and T. Dr Young, whose attention had been chiefly directed to the enchorial or civil method of writing, did not, unfortunately, proceed further in his analytical investigation of the values of the purely hieroglyphic signs; but the seven letters which he had thus determined may nevertheless be regarded as