Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/21

Rh tion, so has it only been perfected <after many centuries of experiment and fruitless labour. We, to whom the Alphabetic system has been handed down as the bequest of a remote antiquity, find a difficulty in transporting our minds backwards to the period when it was yet unknown; the extreme simplicity of the method makes us accept it as a matter of course, as an instrument which man has always possessed, not as something only wrought out by patient, oft repeated trials in the course of ages. Till we study the Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are not aware how difficult it must have been for the more perfect Phonetic system to displace the Pictorial, how long they continued co-ordinate, what perplexity of rules this co-ordination engendered, how obstinately the routine of habit maintained an old method however intricate and inconvenient, against a new principle however simple and broad in its application. The history of writing, in a word, exhibits to us most impressively a type of that great struggle between new inventions and inveterate routine, out of which civilisation has been slowly and painfully evolved.

When we pass from the study of imperfect and transition systems of writing, such as the Mexican, Egyptian, Cuneiform, and Chinese, to the study of perfect alphabets, it is rather the tradition of the art from race to race, than the inventive genius shown in its development, which forms the subject of our inquiries.

The Phœnician alphabet is the primary source of the system of writing we now use. The Greek and Roman alphabets, each adapted from the Phœnician with certain additions and modifications, were gradually diffused by commerce or conquest through the length and breadth of the ancient civilised world. On the decay of the Western empire of the Romans, their alphabet, like their language, law, architecture, and sculpture, became the property of their Teutonic conquerors.

Rude hands now wielded these great instruments of civilisation; strong wills moulded and adapted them to new wants and conditions; and it was thus that the Roman alphabet, transferred from marble to parchment, no longer graven but written, was gradually transformed into that fantastic and complicated character which is popularly called black letter, and in which the original simple type is some-