this paper, then, is a MS. in French, procured by Mr. Penn, at Lisle, in Flanders, in 1819, and containing the report of a military survey of the coasts and defences of Egypt and Syria, which appears to have been secretly made by a Burgundian knight, Guillebert de Lannoy, at the command of our Henry V. The authenticity of this MS. is confirmed by the existence of an exact duplicate, of the same report, in the Bodleian Library, which, owing probably to its having been erroneously entered in the catalogue of that library, as "Itinerarium Egypti et Syriæ, per mandatum Henrici VI." (instead of Henrici V.), had remained unnoticed, until rescued from obscurity by Mr. Penn's search after such a document. The Bodleian MS. is evidently, by its title or preamble, the very report prepared by the author, for the use of the sovereign by whose command the survey had been made: the Lisle MS. appears to be a copy reserved by Lannoy himself, for record, in his own family. The existence of the report, altogether, was thus worth notice; because it proves, that Henry V., in the midst of his victorious career in France, and immediately after the reversionary settlement of the crown of that kingdom in his favour, by the treaty of Troyes, had so far seriously meditated a crusade to the Holy Land, as to dispatch a trusty knight on this confidential and distant reconnaissance. And, moreover, because it illustrates the meaning, and in some measure confirms the truth, of the dying declaration of the royal hero; "that if it had pleased God to have prolonged his life, it had been his intention, after settling the peace of France, to undertake the conquest of Jerusalem:" a purpose quite in consonance with the chivalrous spirit and lofty ambition of his character; but of the sincerity of which, no evidence had appeared to remain.

Thus far the illustration afforded by this MS., if not very important in its bearings, is at least curious and interesting; and Mr. Penn's publication of the circumstance has added one little explanatory fact to the personal history of Henry V. But, having fallen upon a fortunate novelty, he has not been by any means satisfied with such a brief exposition as the case demanded; nor has he been able to forego the delight of enhancing the magnitude of the occasion, by an ambitious and not very successful attack upon the passage in which Hume has recorded Henry's dying declaration. Hence the pompous promise of vindicating its veracity against the scepticism of David Hume! The comment of the philosophic historian, upon the dying declaration of the monarch, is simply :-"So ingenious are men in deceiving themselves, that Henry forgot in these moments all the blood spilt by his ambition, and received comfort from this late and feeble resolve; which, as the mode of these enterprises was now past, he certainly would never have carried into execution!" The mere tone of this paragraph is sufficient to throw Mr. Granville Penn into a fit of violent indignation; and he at once resolves upon an exposure which shall annihilate the repu

tation of its unhappy author. Thus, throughout several pages, he reiterates many hard words against the spirit of the whole passage, and rings the changes upon the 'perverse and vexatious'-the 'indecent and insulting the unworthy-the 'contumelious'-and the foolish and MALIGNANT' Scepticism of Hume!

Now really this is all very sad trifling; Hume, be it observed, does not deny the sincerity, at the moment, of the intention expressed by the dying monarch; he is only sceptical' on the probability that the enterprise would ever have been realised. And, considering that he wrote under the absence of all evidence, that any serious measures had ever been taken preparatory to its execution, we cannot see any thing surprising in his characterising it as a "late and feeble resolve." Nor, we imagine, will many be found in the present day to dissent from the sound philosophy of the accompanying reflection; surely it was a miserable delusion and self-deception, excusable only in the darkness of that age, which could believe that the intention of a crusade might atone for the blood-shed of ambition.

The next papers in the series of the Society's Transactions are, six letters or essays, by Mr. Sharon Turner, on the affinities and origin of languages. In these dissertations, it seems to have been Mr. Turner's object to classify, as far as possible, the similarities of sound used by various nations to express the same simple ideas, and, from such natural evidence as might thus be collected, to support the moral evidence of the Mosaic relation, regarding the common origin of language and the subsequent dispersion of tongues. He begins with arranging the terms employed in the different languages of the earth, to designate the numerals one and two; and he endeavours to establish, from the comparisons, the following positions:

1. That almost all the numerals of different nations are combinations of simpler terms, used also for numerals by some nation or other; and

2. That these combinations have been used for the numbers they represent, by people who have no immediate contiguity, and who often do not, in other respects, seem to have had a visible relationship.'

For the maintenance of his theory, he is, it must be confessed, able to adduce a great many coincidences which are really very curious; and he mingles with these a still greater number, which are only fanciful, and no otherwise existent than in his own imagination. Yet we are disposed so far to agree with him as to believe, that the mass of apparent similarities is, on the whole, too large to have been quite accidental. In the prosecution of his inquiry, he passes from the consideration of numerals, to observe the terms used by different nations for Mother and Father. Such is his industry, that he has 'collected three hundred and fifty-nine words, which have been used in various parts of the world to

express Mother, and from nearly as many languages.' These three hundred and fifty-nine words are susceptible, as he justly shews, of some very striking arrangements. The large majority of them fall naturally within two great classes, in which the letters M and N are respectively the governing sound, there being one hundred and twenty-six cases of the former, and one hundred and thirteen of the latter. With respect to these similarities, all forming the first natural call of the child to its mother, we should be strongly disposed to attribute the analogy among them to their common facility for infant utterance; but a doubt having been started to Mr. Turner himself, as he informs us, to the same effect, by an intelligent promoter and attached friend of the Society,' viz.whether the sounds of Ma and Mama may not be one of those onomatopaias, or natural sounds, which have resulted from the instinctive utterance, or organic tendencies, of the babe in its first vocal efforts'--he has not failed to provide himself with arguments to obviate this fair and ingenious objection.' He denies that any single sound is exclusively natural to children; and he labours to prove that there is no universal tendency to any one articulate word more than another. His reasoning is worth attention, though it is far from being altogether satisfactory; for that some sounds -not any one universally-are easier of utterance to children than others, and that those are the sounds which in general prevail to express the idea, Mother, no philologist will surely be prepared, upon a few exceptions, to deny.

'It does not seem correct, to say, that any one sound which involves a consonant is more natural than another. All the consonants require peculiar movements of the organs of speech, and of different organs, in order to be pronounced. The vowels seem to be mere expirations of the breath, and yet, even they occasion some changes in the position of the interior parts of the mouth, that they may be made audible, or be formed; and, unless every child has the same uniform and invariable tendency to utter one sound, and that only in its first efforts of voice, how can we suppose any natural and universal utterance of one simple sound more than another? No note of an octave of music is more natural than another. The a, the b, and the c, are as natural as the f, the d, and the g; and all their combinations are artificia!, or caused. Some animals are confined to particular sounds, as the sheep to its bleat, the duck to its quack, the peacock to its scream, and the cuckoo to its note; but, they do not go beyond these: they can utter no other, and therefore, these are invariable and universal to the peculiar animals. It is not so with man: being capable of making endless combinations, and mutations of words, he is not limited to any. No single one is peculiarly or exclusively natural to him; and, it is this absence of any vocal tendency of his colloquial organs to one sound more than to another, which has occasioned the vast diversity of his articulate language. If any set of words could be more natural to him than others, it would be such flowing and liquid ones as the Italian and Malay; and, the most wild, that is, the nations nearest to the state of mere nature, would most abound with these: and yet two of the earth's tribes who seem to be

the most remote from all civilization, and the most under the government of mere nature, the Esquimaux and the Greenlanders,-have languages that are remarkable for the harshness and difficulty of their vocal sounds.

'Herodotus mentions a king of Egypt, who directed his attention to find out the first natural sound of an infant's voice, that he might thereby determine which was the most ancient nation*. The two children, whom he caused to be brought up for two years, in a lone cottage, without hearing any language, uttered bek or bekos, as their earliest articulate sound. An Indian king is noticed, by Purchas, to have made a similar experiment: he very briefly mentions it from the Letters of the Jesuits, on the Mogul Empire: he calls the sovereign Melabdim Echebar, the Great Mogor, who reigned about the year 1600. Thirty children were brought up, by his orders, without instruction, and guards were stationed, to prevent their nurses from speaking to them. His absurd idea is stated to have been, that he would adopt the religion to which these babes should incline. The result was, as might have been expected, that the children never spoke at all, and the Great Mogul had still his religion to seek, and therefore, never settled in anyt.

'It is now twenty-six years ago since I tried to observe, in my own family, if a babe was led by nature to utter any one peculiar sound nore than another, distinct from that tone of crying which is common to all, and is the expression of their pain. All that could be perceived, was, that the earliest and most used sound was that which may be expressed by the word goo. As the babe lay in its nurse's lap, after feeding, pleased and contented, it seemed to amuse itself with repeatedly uttering this sound. As well as could be ascertained, this action was, as far as any intellectual feeling accompanied it, nature's expression of its own pleasure and satisfaction in the gratification it had received, and was enjoying; and, as far as concerned the organs that issued the word, it was the motion of the gratified throat, at the top of the larynx, and of the protruded lips, which so far operated on the exhaling breath as to give it the sound of goo. The feeling and effort appeared to me, to be quite analogous to the purring of a cat, in her happy and tuneful moments, but there was no peculiar use of such sounds as Ma and Mama. Other young paternal experimentalists must determine this point for themselves; they will probably find the result to differ in many cases, and the difference will shew that nature is not, in this respect, governed by any universal rule, and therefore has no universal tendency to any one articulate word more than to another.'-pp. 50, 52.

But whatever may be thought of the value of Mr. Turner's arguments, there can be no question, that his speculations are here highly interesting, and that the object of his inquiry is inoffensive, and, in its perfect harmony with revelation, even praiseworthy. We observe, that his last letter opens with an apology for the discontinuance of his essays, on the score of his occupation in preparing for the press the history of the reign of Henry VIII. It would have been well for his reputation, if the Society had so effectually engrossed his attention, as to have saved a royal associate' of their body, from the exposure of that monument of preju

* L. ii. c. 2. + Purchas' Pilgr. vi., p. 39, and 515.

dice and bigotry. It would have been well, if his colleagues had weaned him from the perverted pursuit of historical studies, and confined him to philological inquiries, innocent in themselves, and more suitable to the measure and form of his intellectual capacity.

We pass over a rambling, disjointed, and utterly inconsequential paper by Sir William Ousely, entitled 'Observations on the River Euphrates,' to arrive at an interesting Historical Account of the Discoveries made in Palimpsest MSS.,' by Archdeacon Nares. This is a clear and satisfactory production, written with simplicity, and a total absence of undue pretensions to learning. It affords no novelty to the scholar, but may instruct and interest the general reader. The common practice, during the dark ages, of obliterating ancient writings on MSS., and using the parchment to receive some other work, too frequently entailed the destruction of the most precious relics of classical antiquity; but the endeavour totally to wash out or erase the first writing, often so far failed, that an attentive eye might, with more or less difficulty, discover the traces of the older letters, and even decypher the words. MSS. of respectable antiquity have thus been found sometimes to conceal within themselves others, some centuries older, and often of much superior interest and value. The decyphering of the more ancient matter has thus become a most interesting and laborious occupation to the learned; and Archdeacon Nares has chosen an attractive little subject of dissertation, in the history of such investigations of palimpsest, or rescript MSS., as they have indifferently been called by the learned, from having been twice washed, or twice written.

The industrious examination of palimpsests has been chiefly the work of the last hundred years. The first MS. of the kind, of which any material use was made, appears to have been the Coder Ephrem, in the royal library at Paris :-a rescript, of which the more modern part contains certain works of Ephrem the Syrian, but the more ancient seems to have been a Greek version of the whole of the Old and New Testament, probably of the sixth or seventh century. This has been partially decyphered, and used for purposes of collation, by sacred writers. Next, in 1762, Knittel, Archdeacon of Wolfenbuttel, recovered, with infinite labour, from under a palimpsest MS. of the Origines of Isidorus, a translation of part of the Epistle to the Romans, which had been made by a bishop of Gothland, in the fourth century, into the old language of that country. Subsequently, the attention of the learned in Great Britain, was attracted to the investigation of palimpsests; and in 1801, that eminent and eccentric scholar, the late Dr. Barrett, of Trinity College, Dublin, produced his elegant and accurate volume, containing a great part of the Gospel of St. Matthew, from a rescript MS. in the library of his college.

But, beyond all comparison, the most successful and distinguished decypherer of palimpsests, is the learned Italian, Angelo