The ancient Egyptians had two ways of quick writing, the Hieratic (or priestly), which was employed for the sacred writings only, and the Demotic, used by the people, which was employed for law-papers, letters, and all writing that did not touch on religious matter or enter into the province of the priest. Yet, though literature increased and writing was much practised by people engaged in the ordinary business of life (we see pictures on the tombs of the great man’s upper servant seated before his desk and recording with reed-pen and ink-horn the numbers of the flocks and herds belonging to the farm), little was done to simplify the art of writing by the ancient Egyptians. Down to the latest times when Hieroglyphics were cut, and Demotic and Hieratic characters written, the same confusing variety of signs were employed--pictorial, ideographic, symbolic, phonetic--all mixed up together, with nothing to distinguish them but the determinative signs before spoken of, which themselves added a new element to the complexity. It was left for a less conservative and more enterprising people than the ancient Egyptians to take the last and greatest step in perfecting the invention which the ancient [Sidenote: The Phœnician alphabet.] Egyptians had brought so far on its road, and by throwing away all the first attempts, to allow the serviceable, successful parts of the system to stand out clear. The Phœnicians, to whom tradition points as the introducers of our alphabet into Europe, and who, during early ages, were in very close political and trading connection with the ancient Egyptians, are now believed to be the authors of the improvement by which we benefit. They did not invent the alphabet which the Greeks learned from them; they could have had no reason to invent signs, when they must have been well acquainted with the superabundance that had been in use for centuries before they began to build their cities by the sea-shore. What they probably did was to choose from the Egyptian characters, with which all the traders of the world must have been familiar, just so many phonemes or sound-carrying signs as represented the sounds of which their speech was made up; and rejecting all others, they kept strictly to these chosen ones in all their future writings. This was a great work to have accomplished, and we must not suppose that it was done by one man, or even in one generation; as probably it took a very long time to perfect the separation between vowels and consonants: a distinction which had already been made by the ancient Egyptians, for they had vowel signs, though, as before remarked, they constantly made their consonants carry the vowels, and spelt words with consonants alone. You will remember that consonants are the most important elements of language, and constitute, as we have said before, the bones of words; but also that distinctions of time, person, and case depend in an early