Taylor's History of the Alphabet; Dwight's Philology; Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry; Lowth's Hebrew Poetry; Asiatic Researches; the works of Gesenius, De Wette, Ewald, Colebrooke, Sir William Jones, Wilson, Ward; Schlegel's Hindu Language and Literature; Max Müller's History of Sanskrit Literature; and What India has taught us; Malcolm's History of Persia; Richardson on the Language of Eastern Nations; Adelung's Mithridates; Chodzko's Specimens of the Popular Poetry of Persia; Costello's Rose Garden of Persia; Rémusat's Mémoire sur l'Ecriture Chinoise; Davis on the Poetry of the Chinese; Williams's Middle Kingdom; The Mikado's Empire; Rein's Travels in Japan; Duhalde's Description de la Chine; Champollion's Letters; Wilkinson's Extracts from Hieroglyphical Subjects; the works of Bunsen, Müller, and Lane; Müller's History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, continued by Donaldson; Browne's History of Roman Classical Literature; Fiske's Manual of Classical Literature; Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe; Goodrich's Universal History; Sanford's Rise and Progress of Literature; Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature; Schlegel's History of Dramatic Art; Tiraboschi's History of Italian Literature; Maffei, Corniani, and Ugoni on the same subject; Chambers's Handbooks of Italian and German Literature; Vilmar's History of German Literature; Foster's Handbook of French Literature; Nisard's Histoire de la Littérature Française; Demogeot's Histoire de la Littérature française; Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature; Talvi's (Mrs. Robinson) Literature of the Slavic Nations; Mallet's Northern Antiquities; Keyson's Religion of the Northmen; Pigott's Northern Mythology; William and Mary Howitt's Literature and Romance of Northern Europe; De s'Gravenweert's Sur la Littérature Néerlandaise; Siegenbeck's Histoire Littéraire des Pays- Bas; Da Pontes' Poets and Poetry of Germany; Menzel's German Literature; Spaulding's History of English Literature; Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature; Shaw's English Literature; Stedman's Victorian Poets; Trübner's guide to American Literature; Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia of American Literature; Griswold's Poets and Prose Writers of America; Tuckerman's Sketch of American Literature; Frothingham's Transcendental Movement in New England. French, English, and American Encyclopaedias, Biographies, Dictionaries, and numerous other works of reference have also been extensively consulted. INTRODUCTION. THE ALPHABET. 1. The Origin of Letters.--2. The Phoenician Alphabet and Inscriptions.-- 3, The Greek Alphabet. Its Three Epochs.--4. The Medieval Scripts. The Irish. The Anglo-Saxon. The Roman. The Gothic. The Runic.