The great French poet of his age probably did not know that what he thus said was actually believed by the Cabalists. According to them the ancient Hebrews represented the stars, severally and collectively, by the letters of their alphabet; to read the stars, therefore, was more than a metaphorical expression with them. And an astral alphabet for genethliacal purposes was published near the close of the fifteenth century, at Cracow, by Rabbi Kapol Ben Samuel, in a work entitled “The Profundity of Profundities.” But as this would rest upon an insecure foundation,—for who could be assured that the alphabet had been accurately made out?—it has been argued that the Heavens are repeatedly in the Scriptures called a Book, whence it is to be inferred that they contain legible characters: that the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis ought to be translated, “In the beginning God created the letter, or character of the Heavens;” and that in the nineteenth Psalm we should read “their line,” instead of “their sound has gone forth into all lands,” this referring to their arrangement in the firmament like letters upon a roll of parchment. Jews, Platonists and Fathers of the Church, are shewn to have believed in this celestial writing. And there can be no question but that both the language and the characters must be Hebrew, that being the original speech, and those the original characters, and both divinely communicated to man, not of human invention. But single stars are not to be read as letters, as in the Astral Alphabet. This may be a convenient mode of noting them in astronomical observations; the elements of this celestial science are more recondite in proportion as the science itself is more mysterious. An understanding eye may distinguish that the stars in their groups form Hebrew letters, instead of those imaginary shapes which are called the signs of the Zodiac. But as the Stars appear to us only as dots of light, much skill and sagacity are required for discovering how they combine into the complex forms of the Hebrew alphabet. The astral scholar reads them as antiquaries have made out inscriptions upon Roman buildings by the marks of the nails, when the letters themselves had been torn away by rapacious hands for the sake of the metal. Indeed it is not unlikely that the Abbé Barthelemi took the hint from the curiously credulous work of his countryman, Gaffarel, who has given examples of this celestial writing from the Rabbis Kapol, Chomer and Abiudan. In these examples the stars are represented by white spots upon the black lines of the Hebrew letter. The Abbé, when he writes upon this subject to Count Caylus, seems not to have known that Peiresc had restored ancient inscriptions by the same means; if, however, he followed the example of Peiresc without chusing to mention his name, that omni-erudite man himself is likely to have seen the books from whence Gaffarel derived his knowledge.