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If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe.
Grattan could hardly have brought himself to believe that the real repeal of the Union would actually be signed in London in the strange script as remote as the snaky ornament of the Celtic crosses. It would have seemed like Washington signing the Declaration of Independence in the picture-writing of the Red Indians.
The Red Indians have always, as far as European knowledge goes, been in the habit of using this picture-writing for the purpose of retaining their legends, poems, and incantations. It is unnecessary to say that the picture-writing of Mexico and the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt are derived from the same savage processes.
The original writing, it would therefore seem, was a picture-writing as rude as that of the Mexicans. Objects were themselves represented, but coarsely and grotesquely and, which is especially remarkable, without any curved lines. This would seem to indicate that the system grew up where a hard material, probably stone, was alone used.
It requires the greatest possible stretch of liberality for one accustomed to Indian efforts of this kind to dignify such intolerable daubs with the name of paintings. And yet this is the picture-writing of the Aztecs, with which the world has been so edified for centuries.
But this was not true of painting, which was then but little more than the painting of the Egyptians had been, that is, a sort of picture-writing, which was principally used to illustrate the doctrines of religion, and by this means to teach them to peoples who had no books, and could not have read them had they existed.
The scribes and carvers knew very well how beautiful their work was, and were careful to make it look as beautiful as possible; so much so, that if they found that the grouping of figures to make up a particular word or sentence was going to be ugly or clumsy, they would even prefer to spell the word wrong, rather than spoil the appearance of their picture-writing.
It is indeed thus that clever children work, when in the picture-writing of their sketch books they violate the laws of perspective by combining separate aspects and memories of an object into an inconsistent whole. They will not omit any peculiarity of a person which happens to have struck them, even when in the profile which they sketch it would be invisible.
"There might be something in it, you know," said Meschines, after a pause. "The treasures of Montezuma have never been found. Is there no old chart or writing, in your collection of curiosities and relics, that might throw light on it?" "The scriptures of Anahuac were of the hieroglyphic type, picture-writing," replied the other.
This is a curiously conglomerate system of writing, made up in part of symbols reminiscent of the crudest stages of picture-writing, in part of symbols having the phonetic value of syllables, and in part of true alphabetical letters. In a word, the Egyptian writing represents in itself the elements of the various stages through which the art of writing has developed.
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