Handbook of Universal Literature | Page 5

2. Fiction: "George Eliot," McDonald, Collins, Black, Blackmore, Mrs. Oliphant, Yates, McCarthy, Trollope, and others. 3. Scientific Writers: Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, and others. 4. Miscellaneous.
AMERICAN LITERATURE.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD.--1. The Seventeenth Century. George Sandys; The Bay Psalm Book; Anne Bradstreet, John Eliot, and Cotton Mather.--2. From 1700 to 1770. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Cadwallader Colden.
FIRST AMERICAN PERIOD, FROM 1771 TO 1820.--1. Statesmen and Political Writers: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton; The Federalist; Jay, Madison, Marshall, Fisher Ames, and others.--2. The Poets: Freneau, Trumbull, Hopkinson, Barlow, Clifton, and Dwight.--3. Writers in other Departments: Bellamy, Hopkins, Dwight, and Bishop White. Rush, McClurg, Lindley Murray, Charles Brockden Brown. Ramsay, Graydon. Count Rumford, Wirt, Ledyard, Pinkney, and Pike.
SECOND AMERICAN PERIOD, FROM 1820 TO 1860.--1. History, Biography, and Travels: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Godwin, Ticknor, Schoolcraft, Hildreth, Sparks, Irving, Headley, Stephens, Kane, Squier, Perry, Lynch, Taylor, and others.--2. Oratory: Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Benton, Everett, and others.--3. Fiction: Cooper, Irving, Willis, Hawthorne, Poe, Simms, Mrs. Stowe, and others.--4. Poetry: Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Longfellow, Willis, Lowell, Allston, Hillhouse, Drake, Whittier, Hoffman, and others. --5. The Transcendental Movement in New England.--6. Miscellaneous Writings: Whipple, Tuckerman, Curtis, Brigge, Prentice, and others.--7. Encyclopaedias, Dictionaries, and Educational Books. The Encyclopaedia Americana. The New American Cyclopaedia. Allibone, Griswold, Duyckinck, Webster, Worcester, Anthon, Felton, Barnard, and others.--8. Theology, Philosophy, Economy, and Jurisprudence: Stuart, Robinson, Wayland, Barnes, Channing, Parker. Tappan, Henry, Hickok, Haven. Carey, Kent, Wheaton, Story, Livingston, Lawrence, Bouvier.--9. Natural Sciences: Franklin, Morse, Fulton, Silliman, Dana, Hitchcock, Rogers, Bowditch, Peirce, Bache, Holbrook, Audubon, Morton, Gliddon, Maury, and others.--10. Foreign Writers: Paine, Witherspoon, Rowson, Priestley, Wilson, Agassiz, Guyot, Mrs. Robinson, Gurowski, and others.--11. Newspapers and Periodicals. --12. Since 1860.
CONCLUSION.
INDEX.

LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
The following works are the sources from which this book is wholly or chiefly derived:--
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 Fran?aise; Demogeot's Histoire de la Littérature fran?aise; 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.
1. THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS.--Alphabetic writing is an art easy to acquire, but its invention has tasked the genius of the three most gifted nations of the ancient world. All primitive people have begun to record events and transmit messages by means of rude pictures of objects, intended to represent things or thoughts, which afterwards became the symbols of sounds. For instance, the letter M is traced down from the conventionalized picture of an owl in the ancient language of Egypt, Mulak. This was used first to denote the bird itself; then it stood for the name of the bird; then gradually became a syllabic sign to express the sound "mu," the first syllable of the name, and ultimately to denote "M," the initial sound of that syllable.
In like manner A can be shown to be originally the picture of an eagle, D of a hand, F of the horned asp, R, of the mouth, and so on.
Five