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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Essays so dark, Champollion might despair To guess what mummy of a thought was there, Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase, Looks like a zebra in a parson's chaise." Or this at our transcendental friends: "Deluded infants! will they never know Some doubts must darken o'er the world below Though all the Platos of the nursery trail Their clouds of glory at the go-cart's tail?"
For him to descend from the firmament of metaphor, to the plain prose of George Street and Paternoster Row for him, Mr North inspects boxes of Balaam, with the patience of a proofreader, and deciphers pages of wit and pathos with the perseverance of a Champollion.
This guess proved correct; and owing to the decipherment of one of the inscriptions, a test was obtained, and the same plan was followed as that of Champollion with regard to the Rosetta stone, on which was the tri-lingual inscription in Greek, Demotic or Enchorial, and hieroglyphic characters.
The work of Young and Champollion, says Doctor Williams,* gives a new interest to the mass of records, in the form of graven inscriptions, and papyrus rolls, and cases and wrappings, which abound in Egypt, but which hitherto had served no better purpose for centuries than to excite, without satisfying, the curiosity of the traveller. * History of the Art of Writing, Portfolio I., plate 8.
The framed hieroglyphics on the tablet of Rosetta could, as the Greek text taught, signify but the name of Ptolemaios. Champollion also had originally held the same erroneous opinion as Young and his predecessors.
But she did well, for if she martyrized Tagalog, Spanish fared no better with her, either in regard to grammar or pronunciation, in spite of her husband, the chairs and the shoes, all of which had done what they could to teach her. One of the words that had cost her more effort than the hieroglyphics cost Champollion was the name Filipinas.
It is to this stone, with its three kinds of letters, and to the skill and industry of Dr. Thomas Young, and of the French scholar, Champollion, that we now owe our knowledge of hieroglyphics.
True, Champollion, the founder of this science, termed it "a beautiful dowerless maiden," but I could venture to woo her, and felt grateful that, in choosing my profession, I could follow my inclination without being forced to consider pecuniary advantages. The province of labour was found, but with each step forward the conviction of my utter lack of preparation for the new science grew clearer.
But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow?
Especially in England various efforts were made to have, not him, but Thomas Young, recognized as the discoverer of the science of deciphering hieroglyphics. But though Young had succeeded previously to Champollion in deciphering some hieroglyphic names in a mechanical way, yet the genial Englishman mistook, during the whole course of his activity, the real character of hieroglyphic writing.
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