Having completed his tour to the most celebrated repositories of art in Italy, and enriched his mind, and improved his taste, by the perusal rather than the imitation of their best pieces, he returned to Rome, and applied himself to a minute and assiduous study of the great ornaments of that capital, directing his principal attention to the works of Raphael, and improving his knowledge of the antient costume by the study of Cameos, in which he was assisted by Mr. Wilcox, the author of the Roman Conversations,--to whom he had been introduced by Mr. Robinson, at Mr. Crespigné's, on the occasion of the exhibition of the Portrait,--a man of singular attainments in learning, and of a serene and composed dignity of mind and manners that rendered him more remarkable to strangers than even his great classical knowledge. Of all the monuments of antient art in Rome, the Obelisk brought from Egypt, in the reign of Augustus, interested his curiosity the most, and even for a time affected him as much as those which so agitated him by their beauty. The hieroglyphics appeared to resemble so exactly the figures in the Wampum belts of the Indians, that it occurred to him, if ever the mysteries of Egypt were to be interpreted, it might be by the aborigines of America. This singular notion was not, however, the mere suggestion of fancy, but the effect of an opinion which his early friend and tutor Provost Smith conceived, in consequence of attending the grand meeting of the Indian chiefs, with the Governors of the British colonies, held at East town, in Pennsylvania, in the year following the disastrous fate of Bradock's army. The chiefs had requested this interview, in order to state to the officers the wrongs and injuries of which they complained; and at the meeting they evidently read the reports and circumstances of their grievances from the hieroglyphical chronicle of the Wampum belts, which they held in their hands, and by which, from the date of their grand alliance with William Penn, the man from the ocean, as they called him, they minutely related all the circumstances in which they conceived the terms and spirit of the treaty had been infringed by the British, defying the officers to show any one point in which the Indians had swerved from their engagements. It seemed to Dr. Smith that such a minute traditionary detail of facts could not have been preserved without some contemporary record; and he, therefore, imagined, that the constant reference made to the figures on the belts was a proof that they were chronicles. This notion was countenanced by another circumstance which Mr. West had himself often noticed. The course of some of the high roads through Pennsylvania lies along what were formerly the war tracks of the Indians; and he had frequently seen hieroglyphics engraved on the trees and rocks. He was told that they were inscriptions left by some of the tribes who had passed that