f Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson had been in vain,
and to lay down once for all the general principle that the original
meaning of inscriptions written in a dead language, of which the
tradition is once lost, can never be recovered. Fortunately, questions
of this kind are not settled by eloquent pleading or by the votes of
majorities, but, on the contrary, by the independent judgment of the
few who are competent to judge. The fact that different scholars
should differ in their interpretations, or that the same scholars
should reject his former translation, and adopt a new one that
possibly may have to be surrendered again as soon as new light can be
thrown on points hitherto doubtful and obscure--all this, which in the
hands of those who argue for victory and not for truth, constitutes so
formidable a weapon, and appeals so strongly to the prejudices of the
many, produces very little effect on the minds of those who understand
the reason of these changes, and to whom each new change represents
but a new step in advance in the discovery of truth.

Nor should the fact be overlooked that, if there seems to be less
change in the translation of the books of the Old Testament for
instance, or of Homer, it is due in a great measure to the absence of
that critical exactness at which the decipherers of ancient
inscriptions and the translators of the Veda and Zend-Avesta aim in
rendering each word that comes before them. If we compared the
translation of the Septuagint with the authorised version of the Old
Testament, we should occasionally find discrepancies nearly as
startling as any that can be found in the different translations of
the cuneiform inscriptions, or of the Veda and Zend-Avesta. In the
Book of Job, the Vulgate translates the exhortation of Job's wife by
'Bless God and die;' the English version by 'Curse God and die;' the
Septuagint by 'Say some word to the Lord and die.' Though, at the time
when the Seventy translated the Old Testament, Hebrew could hardly be
called a dead language, yet there were then many of its words the
original meaning of which even the most learned rabbi would have had
great difficulty in defining with real accuracy. The meaning of words
changes imperceptibly and irresistibly. Even where there is a
literature, and a printed literature like that of modern Europe, four
or five centuries work such a change that few even of the most learned
divines in England would find it easy to rea