"The latter possesses one thousand black elephants, and five of a lighter colour, which are rare here, and found nowhere else. When one of these last is found, he is taken to the king at Rochapatta, and the discoverer is considered fortunate.

“The crocodiles are caught in pits or traps, or slain by arrows; but they are not the only pests of the island, for the winged insects (Fliegen) are so numerous and bloodthirsty that the royal messengers, in their journeys through the woods, are often killed by them.

"These particulars were on their return engraved by Joram on a pillar in the court of the temple of Melikertes. This was overthrown by an earthquake (ev τy népvoɩ oɛioμų rñs yns) but remains, and the inscription is still legible."

It is clear that the island and its king bear but the disguised name of the Rakshas. It unfortunately happens that the ancient inhabitants of the interior of Ceylon knew nothing of the seacoast; a fact proved by their own traditions: that the bears, leopards, and ant-eaters formed as striking a feature as the elephants even then: and that centipedes, scorpions, spiders, and more especially the enormous serpents, must have escaped their notice altogether; for we presume that Mr. Wagenfeld himself, though with so many marvels at command, would not class all these amongst the flies (Fliegen). Farther, the natives, having proper names of places in their own tongue, need not have borrowed such from languages wholly unknown to them, or at best but in hostility, at the time. To pass over other trifling matters, such as the traces of Buddha, the sacrificial ceremonies, and the white elephant story, all traceable elsewhere, it is strange the inscribing Tyrians left no inscriptions on the coast or interior; for, if they did, it must have been in a language and character unknown to them and the natives, such as we find the said monuments, which resemble those Mr. Wathen has shown to be of continental India-and are certainly not Phoenician.

It is singular that the voyagers who had beheld so many palm trees, near Eilotha, which was the place selected for building their fleet, and which, rather oddly, afforded no wood fit for that purpose, so that they adopted the simple expedient of transporting thither enough to load eight thousand camels; it is singular, we must observe, that these voyagers did not recognize the cocoapalm of the Ceylonese sea-coast, or remark its absence from the interior in those days, or slurred over its affinity to those of Phoenicia. Possibly the mountain-heaps of elephants' teeth and jewels concealed the tall trees from their closer view, or blinded them to every other consideration; or else the pearls that rolled to the shore prevented them from looking up. The cinnamon fared better; we presume, because their olfactories were not so agreeably occupied otherwise; and the trace of Buddha's foot on the

VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVII.

mountain-top proves that they were not indifferent inquirers, since they brought home a legend 1000 years before its existence. Whatever be the era of that mystic personage, and we ourselves incline to as old a date as even the Germans assign him, and consequently a far older than is allowed by the modern English orientalists; that he should have been known to the Phoenicians so long before he was born increases not a little our respect for veracious history. We had fancied the oldest legend referred to Adam, but are content to accept a miracle instead of it, and deem ourselves great gainers by the exchange. The connexion with the interior and the thickly populated villages of Ceylon, while the Arabian coast was desolate, though nearer to the primitive abodes of man, were of course cotemporary with this pre-adventual advent: and other particulars, found in other books, most probably have been taken from this source. The princess Abbassa doubtless borrowed her desolated comparison from hence and the liberty of choice, and destruction of Melikertes' wife by an arrow from afar; the holy mountain and forty days sojourn there; the chimæra-the serpents in the caves (im Holen wohnt des Drachens alte Brut)-the name of Abu Bekr-the fish and muscles; the serpent-legged damsels; the unerring bow; the securing (or skewering) an antagonist to a tree with a lance; the disappearance during a chace; the white elephants; the Ethiopian jugglers and snake-bearers; the loads of elephants' teeth; and many more wonders and facts, all form a body of evidence deduced from all parts of the world, known and unknown, then or now, to prove the authenticity of this work. Ava and Siam, Al Rasheed's sister, Moses, the Greek poets, the Arabian Nights, Strabo, der Freischutz, Hanno's Periplus, Walter Scott, Josephus, Sindbad the Sailor, Bahram Giubin, Romulus, the Persian Tales, the Book of Genesis, Göthe, Mahommed's uncle, and Plutarch; all are evidently but faint and partial reflexes of this authentic and interesting volume. But we would suggest that more than one copy must have existed for so many readers; or, if but the one that fell into the hands of Mr. Frederick Wagenfeld, we cannot wonder that a Portuguese cloister and a patron saint into the bargain should have been expressly created to preserve the treasure for this fortunate youth.

Fortunate, we may truly say, since, for him, the present age has become antiquity, and fable has turned into history for his sake. The Phoenician army and navy list are set before us; and the cotemporary kings of Sidon and Byblos, with many that never belonged to Phoenicia, extend from the year 1820, before (or perhaps after) Christ, down to about 1200. Here Sidon presents the remarkable feature of a century of peace (Hundert

jährige Stille) sufficing for nearly two centuries of time (from 1205 to 1055); a striking moral lesson of the value of peace, we presume. The kings of Byblos adopt an equally novel course; for though the length of each reign and the periods of accession are nicely fixed in the chronological table, backward to the remotest antiquity, and they so regularly preserve their names, as at the distance of seventeen centuries fairly to present us with three for one sovereign; yet, as they come forward towards the time of cotemporary historians, i, e. at 1228 B. C. they become, which is perfectly natural, utterly nameless-Unberühmte Könige: unmarked down to Simaron and Adonilibnas, who are without a date altogether. Nothing can be so satisfactory.

The days of chivalry are past, alas! according to Burke, and in spite of the Manchegan knight, so we can but copy the courtesy of the latter's question to the princess-" Pray why did your highness land at Ossuna, seeing that it is not a sea-port town, but sixteen leagues inland?"-we are as willing as he to credit an impossibility. That a native of Berytus, after writing one book, should alter even his birth-place, in order to include Ceylon in a Phoenician History of Armenian or Syrian names and Persian usages, written in Chaldaic characters, which a Greek translator preserves for a Christian friar to copy and hide in a Portuguese convent, till a German student travels there for his health, we are perfectly ready to believe; but that a learned professor of the nineteenth century should overlook his national learning and his own critical fame, by giving currency to the questionable coin and stamping it with his own superscription by a preface, seems too much for credibility, if not for credulity. The falsehood is almost more probable than the fact. As yet a portion only is public, where is the rest? We would ask

"Where is the chariot-wheel with Pharaoh's name,
And marked with Pharaoh's arms, to stamp his fame?
Where of that stone a slice, and some account,
Given by the Lord to Moses on the Mount?
And where a slice of that stone's elder brother
That, broken, forced the All-Wise to find another?"

Till such are produced, how can we wonder that some other relics of antiquity have escaped this collection?-that the great names of past ages have overlooked Mr. Frederick Wagenfeld? -that Sesostris, marching through Palestine, should not have left the date of his journey, with his card, for Mr. Frederick Wagenfeld?-that Homer did not for his sake answer the doubts of Bryant, on the locality of Troy and the existence of Agamemnon; or those of Wolfe on his own?-that the Samaritans did not settle for him the date of their alphabet?-that the Anakim did not, for him, explain how they got to Judæa?-that the Shep

herds did not leave him a narrative of their exploits and expulsion? --and that the Arabian historians did not write in German to save him from the blunders which his ignorance of their writings occasions? And this too, when Phoenicia altered her vocalic and liquid terminals to sibilants for his private satisfaction, and Baaut or Buddha came down to the Ceylonese mountains to greet him, in fittest compliment to his merits, with the mark of his foot!

For the Hanoverian doctor and midwife of this marvellous labour, we partly acquit him of the suspicious parentage and this posthumous birth of Sanchoniatho the historian: immersed in oriental studies of the gravest kind, that require and engross all the powers of judgment and learning, we can easily conceive the advantage taken of that absorption of his faculties and of the honest simplicity of his character.

But what is he who could avail himself of this? What is he who, received, though a stranger, into the bosom of unsuspecting confidence, has used that confidence only to abuse it? Who has degraded the faith of friendship and borrowed a high reputation, to stain it with the dirt of deception, or trample it as the steppingstone of forgery to fame! Who, in the frankness of youth and innocence, with a pulse steeled to honour and a heart indifferent to shame, has sought instruction for years, to turn it into deliberate crime! Without strength to range, or learning to gather, or taste to select, or judgment to weigh -with neither genius to combine, nor talent to use the facts, open, we had hitherto thought, to the meanest inquirer, he is absolutely ignorant of the very desideratum he is attempting, and steals the wretched materials his poverty cannot invent. The equal blindness of his moral sense nothing amiss in the parasitic creeping round his patron's name, and twining it with the ivy tendrils of his own proper infamy. For previous literary frauds some extenuation might exist; Chatterton had genius-Ireland, at least ingenuity; and both understood the task they undertook. Even Lauder might plead this, and the intensity of hate that darkens sometimes into the sublime. Had those succeeded, they might have boasted their success; and genius or vengeance been pardoned the first foul oblation: but, the Phoenician forgery once proclaimed, the work must fall into scorn; or did the writer mean finally to brave the presence of his Maker with the consciousness of a lie on his soul?

sees

To poison the sources of knowledge is no trifling crime, though falsehoods spring up every hour besides. The annals of the Stock Exchange within our memories recall how chastisement followed one, because most atrocious, deception: and surely some ignominy equally public and damning should brand the forehead of this laboured and treacherous forgery.

name.

Since the above article was put in type, we have received a pamphlet entitled "Die Sanchoniathonische Streitfrage, nach ungedruckten Briefen gewürdigt vom Dr. C. L. Grotefend," the son, we presume, of the learned Director of the Lyceum, whom we have seen ushering this notable discovery before the public, containing the original correspondence relative to the pretended discovery. We find hence that the impostor first wrote under the name of Pereiro-(the final o should have been an a, as it is meant for Portuguese)-then as F. Wilde: then, pretending this last to have been his mother's family name, changing it to Wagenfeld; till some other alias should offer, we presume. The earliest letters contain the word Merinhao, on which we have already remarked; and the name of the river Douro, spelt Duero, as is observed by the Editor : and we would further point out the extreme ignorance of the impostor, who shows by his mode of latinizing it that he was not aware of the true pronunciation of this Portuguese It appears that the letter pretendedly sent by one Christopher Meyer in reality came by the post, and bears the Bremen post-mark; while the first letter, assuming to be Portuguese, has, like all the rest, a German water-mark. The miserable shifts and excuses apparent in every page of the correspondence, and the wretched inconsistencies respecting the fac-simile, which are not worth recording, might, we should have thought, have put the learned editor on his guard at the very commencement of the affair, and saved the world and himself from this silly mystification. Dr. C. L. Grotefend notices, though somewhat late, the change of birth-places in the historian; the Buddha footstep and white elephants of Ceylon; the derivation of Tarsus from Tartessus, and the consequent confounding with ; various errors in the Greek of the fac-simile, which would disgrace a school-boy; and alterations in the Phoenician names, which, it turns out, are stolen and mutilated from a recent work of Professor Gesenius: but we would observe, in reply to an objection of one or both of the learned writers, that the change of y into the short o, is perfectly correct, in transferring Phoenician into Greek; as it so stands in the earliest alphabets of the latter.

We give these facts as supplementary to our own doubts and exposures of the fraud; and must repeat our regrets that so clumsy and obviously elaborated a fabrication should have imposed a single moment on the erudition of a scholar of whom Germany is otherwise so justly proud. As a memorial of this, our critique must remain; for the literary Caspar Hauser, he should, for obvious reasons, change his own nativity and its aspect as soon as he can.