proper names, episodes which seem something like a Chaldaean “Genesis” or “Veda;” now and then a bold flight of fancy, a sudden exaltation of thought, or a felicitous expression, arrests the attention and holds it captive for a time.  In the narrative of the adventures of Grilgames, for instance, there is a certain nobility of character, and the sequence of events, in their natural and marvellous development, are handled with gravity and freedom:  if we sometimes encounter episodes which provoke a smile or excite our repugnance, we must take into account the rudeness of the age with which they deal, and remember that the men and gods of the later Homeric epic are not a whit behind the heroes of Babylonian story in coarseness.  The recognition of divine omnipotence, and the keenly felt afflictions of the soul, awakened in the Chaldaean psalmist feelings of adoration and penitence which still find, in spite of the differences of religion, an echo in our own hearts; and the unknown scribe, who related the story of the descent of Ishtar to the infernal regions, was able to express with a certain gloomy energy the miseries of the “Land without return.  “These instances are to be regarded, however, as exceptional:  the bulk of Chaldaean literature seems nothing more than a heap of pretentious trash, in which even the best-equipped reader can see no meaning, or, if he can, it is of such a character as to seem unworthy of record.  His judgment is natural in the circumstances, for the ancient East is not, like Greece and Italy, the dead of yesterday whose soul still hovers around us, and whose legacies constitute more than the half of our patrimony:  on the contrary, it was buried soul and body, gods and cities, men and circumstances, ages ago, and even its heirs, in the lapse of years, have become extinct.  In proportion as we are able to bring its civilization to light, we become more and more conscious that we have little or nothing in common with it.  Its laws and customs, its methods of action and its modes of thought, are so far apart from those of the present day, that they seem to us to belong to a humanity utterly different from our own.  The names of its deities do not appeal to our imagination like those of the Olympian cycle, and no traditional respect serves to do away with the sense of uncouthness which we experience from the jingle of syllables which enter into them.  Its artists did not regard the world from the same point of view as we do, and its writers, drawing their inspiration from an entirely different source, made use of obsolete methods to express their feelings and co-ordinate their ideas.  It thus happens that while we understand to a shade the classical language of the Greeks and Romans, and can read their works almost without effort, the great primitive literatures of the world, the Egyptian and Chaldaean, have nothing to offer us for the most part but a sequence of problems to solve or of enigmas to unriddle with patience.  How many phrases, how many words at which we stumble,