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The Franciscan was told that the writing “contained hidden things which no stranger ought to know.” It was seen that the pages of the book were “covered with figures of men, animals, and isolated characters, deemed hieroglyphical, and arranged in lines with order and symmetry.” The Panoes said these books “were transmitted to them by their ancestors, and had relation to wanderings and ancient wars.” There is similar writing on a prepared llama skin found among other antiquities on a peninsula in Lake Titicaca, which is now in the museum at La Paz, Bolivia.
After the great fire of London, which Lilly said he had foretold, he was sent for by the committee of the House of Commons appointed to inquire into the causes of the calamity. In his "Monarchy or no Monarchy," published in 1651, he had inserted an hieroglyphical plate, representing on one side persons in winding sheets digging graves; and on the other a large city in flames.
Thus the whole work is not merely "an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson" of ascetic philosophy; it is also a realisation of mediaeval life in its cruellest intensity and most uncompromising truth. For mere beauty these painters had but little regard.
"Even that vulgar music," he says, "which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of God, the first composer. There is something more of divinity in it than the ear discovers. It is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and of the creatures of God.
In the third year of this reign Germanicus Cæsar, who, much against his will, had been sent into the East as governor, found time to leave his own province, and to snatch a hasty view of the time-honoured buildings of Egypt. Descending the river to Thebes, and, while gazing on the huge remains of the temples, he asked the priests to read to him the hieroglyphical writing on the walls.
This is a fact well known to painters, and, for the most part, acknowledged by the critics of painters, namely, that there is a certain distance for which a picture is painted; and that the finish, which is delightful if that distance be small, is actually injurious if the distance be great: and, moreover, that there is a particular method of handling which none but consummate artists reach, which has its effects at the intended distance, and is altogether hieroglyphical and unintelligible at any other.
He further adds how the Chinese, whose, "chronicles antedate the historic records of all other nations, seem to have had a simple but complete mode of communicating ideas by means of florigraphic signs;" whereas, "the monuments of the old Assyrian and Egyptian races bear upon their venerable surfaces a code of floral telegraphy whose hieroglyphical meaning is veiled or but dimly guessed at in our day."
His English was good, his spelling pretty fair, considering the absurd nature of the orthography of his native tongue, and his sense was excellent, but the whole was usually shrouded in hieroglyphical mystery. Miss Jane could only read the opening "My dearest Sisters," and the concluding "George Dunning," nothing more.
She is also called the king's sister in many of the hieroglyphical inscriptions, as are many of the other queens of the Ptolemies who were not so related to their husbands. This custom, though it took its rise in the Egyptian mythology, must have been strengthened by the marriages of Philadelphus and some of his successors with their sisters.
On the western bank, numerous handsome façades and porticos have indeed been hewn out; and mightily interesting they were to wander through, with their elaborate tablets and cursory inscriptions, their hieroglyphical scrolls, their sculptured gods and symbols, and all the luxury of their architectural ornaments.
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