I am happy to tell you that our prospects of new documents from Egypt are very rapidly increasing: Mr. Burton has had the good fortune to discover at length, in a mosque, the triple inscription for which he has been some years in search; and he has been negotiating with the Pacha for its removal. From its magnitude and state of preservation, there is every reason to believe that it will rival the pillar of Rosetta in its importance, and I sincerely hope that it will tend to check the wildness of conjecture, which has been rioting without bounds in the regions of Egyptian literature. Mr. Tattam is printing a Coptic grammar, and I am preparing an Appendix, which is to contain the rudiments of an Enchorial Lexicon: I ardently wish that Mr. Burton’s inscriptions may come to my assistance before I complete it. I have received nothing from France or from Germany for these four years past: even what is published seems by some fatality to have been withheld from me; and the booksellers send no answers to my commissions. I trust your brother will not forget his kind promise to think of me at Berlin. I have to thank him and you for your obliging present of your _Letter to Abel Remusat on the Genius of the Chinese Language_, which has greatly interested me: the best return that I can make will be to give you some remarks which have occurred to me on the language of hieroglyphics in general, [p093] and on the character of the English language, which seems to approach, in its simplicity, as you have yourself observed, to the natural structure of the oldest languages, immediately related to the hieroglyphical form of representation. I fear, however, that I must apologize to you for the want of method with which I shall be obliged at present to throw my fragments together: but it may be allowable to make some difference between a letter and a finished essay.