former about 2° 40', the latter about 3°, northeast of Aden,) copies of these monuments were transcribed with extraordinary care, and transmitted for examination both to India and Europe. Immediately on their reaching England, the inscriptions, it appears, were forwarded to Germany, there to be submitted to the inspection of its two most eminent Orientalists, Professors Gesenius and Roediger. Both have since written upon the subject, (the latter elaborately, first, in a learned paper in the "Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Göttingen, 1837," and, subsequently, in his "Versuch über die Himjaritischen Schriftmonumente, Halle, 1841,") and have favoured the world with the results of their respective examinations. So far as regards the long, or ten-line inscription at Hisn Ghoráb (on the face of it by far the most important of the monuments yet recovered), the joint amount of these results, on their own showing, would seem to be, that the late Professor Gesenius conceived that he found in it the words "King of the Himyarites," and that Professor Roediger has published, what he thinks a translation of the first lines and the last, fairly giving up the middle, as wrapt in impenetrable darkness. So far, however, in reality, are these learned Orientalists from having effected even thus much, that (with the exception of one happy conjecture, subse

quently abandoned by its author,) not a single word, scarcely here and there a letter, of the original inscription has been decyphered by their joint labours.

The facts of the discoveries made by the officers of the Palinurus, and of these German essays towards their interpretation, became first known to me in the summer of 1843; duties and engagements beyond my control, having suspended the prosecution of my work on Arabia, and withdrawn my attention wholly from the subject for the last ten years. Honouring true learning, wherever found, I still could not suppress a feeling of jealous concern for our national honour; a sense of somewhat painful regret, that any but British learning should be judged needful to unveil the mysterious monuments of Arabian antiquity first brought to light by British enterprize, . . . that an interpreter should not be sought and found within the walls of our own venerable seats of learning, above all, in the University of Pocock and of Sir William Jones. With this feeling I took up the unknown inscriptions, and, finding them beyond my interpretation, with this feeling I had laid them down, . . . when, turning once more, for materials for my own work, to the "Historia Imperii vetustissimi Joktanidorum

of H. A. Schultens, . . . in his " Monumenta Vetustiora Arabia" (a tract so rare in this country as not to be found even in the library of the British Museum), which fortunately happened to be bound up with my copy of that work, I opened upon a title and monument, which instantly struck me, from the equal length of the two documents, and the apparent identity of their locality, to be an Arabic version of the ten-line inscription at Hisn Ghoráb.

The steps by which what had been, at first, only a probable conjecture, became advanced, gradually, from conjecture to conviction, and, again, from the conviction of my own mind, to the power of demonstrating the soundness of that conviction to others,... together with my grounds for assigning to these wonderful remains a date of 3500 years (nearly three centuries prior to the Books of Moses), the age of Jacob and Joseph, or within 500 years of the Flood,... will be found in Section vii. of the first part of the Memoir, and in the Appendix.

But it is not the antiquity of these monuments, however high, which constitutes their true value: it is the precious central truths of revealed religion which they record, and which they have

handed down from the first ages of the postdiluvian world, that raise them above all price. Viewed in this aspect, they strike at the very root of scepticism, and leave not even his own hollow ground beneath the feet of the unbeliever. For, if what the infidel vainly would bring into question as originating with Christianity, stands here registered as the primeval faith of mankind, there is an end, at once, to the idle sophistry of unbelief. According to the universal consent of Arabian tradition, the doctrine of the Resurrection was always an article of faith among the ancient Arabs. But, although their belief in this great Gospel truth (however clouded and obscured by the ignorance of Pagan superstition) could not fairly be questioned, still our impression of the bare fact of this belief, derived as it was solely from Mahometan authorities, remained necessarily vague and unsatisfying. The creed which left the camel to perish with hunger by his master's grave, that he might rise again with him for that master's use, while it bore some faint witness to the truth, seemed altogether too low to sustain a reasonable hope in the glorious doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. The inscription on the rock of Hisn Ghoráb, a contemporary witness of the faith of the most ancient of the old Arabians, changes the state of things:

placing beyond the cavils of scepticism itself, at once, the fact and the purity of their belief in the scriptural doctrine of the Resurrection; and presenting to the eye this great Gospel truth (to borrow the noble language of Mr. Burke) "covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages."

No words of mine could describe to Your Grace the sensation of mind awakened by the first certainty arrived at, that all my antecedent conjectures, in the text of the present work, respecting this inscription, were correct; that it is the original, whence was rendered into modern Arabic the poetical inscription in ten couplets, published by Schultens in his "Monumenta;" that this original is a contemporary record of the famous lost tribe of Ad; and that, instead of an obscure chronicle of the private undertakings, the Pagan devotions, the intestine divisions, and the struggles against their warlike neighbours the Homerites, of a set of Abyssinian adventurers (as we are taught to expect by its German interpreter), we possess, in this Adite monument, a magnificent ode, rivalling, in the loftiness of its flights and suddeness of its falls, the winged muse of Pindar; combining with the majesty of Milton the consummate skill of Pope; and embodying,