Letters, as γραμματα or characters, either really or emblematically personate, and represent things and ideas; and as notes of articulate sounds signify internal conceptions, and express them to others. They consist of various sorts, such as simple characters to denote elements or principles; compounds to express complex ideas, and things; the dividers of parts; actives, energies, and affirmatives; and privatives, and negatives. These are the smallest or elementary parts of language, as atoms are of matter and action of motion; an assemblage thereof form particles, as of atoms do those of matter; and a combination of either form more sensible bodies, and so on to the construction of larger forms, masses or sentences; letters having been formed in their shapes and sounds, agreeable to ideas and things, and having a natural connection therewith; and length and breadth affecting the eye in the same manner as their vibrations do the ear, and a combination of both the human will and perception.
Characters, which consist of irregular lines, circles, or curves, are incapable of general signs or meanings, or representing many things; but strait lines, and circles, and their division and multiplication, like the Roman, only are capable of that hieroglyfic, universal representation and meaning, which the first universal language must be supposed to express, and as most other characters seem to be only deviations from the Roman, from mere affectation, or for the conveniency of sculpture, there seems to be no great absurdity in supposing that Adam was furnished with _those_ characters, and instructed in their sounds; that they continued in general use until the confusion of Babel, when mankind began to make use of the noise or sounds of cattle instead of human voices; and that the Romans were furnished with those characters by the Tuscans on their arrival in Italy. Nor does it seem in the least probable that those nations which had been destined by Providence to be the possessors of the most distant countries westward from Asia, who made their way thither accordingly, along the Mediterranean coasts, through Crete, Greece, Sicily, Egypt, Mauritania, Tuscany, Spain, Gaul, and Britain, were in Asia at the time of the confusion. And as those characters are adapted only for the Celtic, Phrygian, or British language, which resolves the names of places of the several countries through which it passed, preferable to the more modern dialects thereof, and Cæsar thought that Druidism began in Britain; it seems very probable that Mercury, Gomer, or Hermes, and other Druids, leaders of the western colonies, were always possest of those _secret_ characters; it being certain that the Gauls before Cæsar’s time had the use of letters. Besides, ancient history takes notice of the hieroglyfics, as consisting of the figures of animals, parts of human bodies, and mechanical instruments invented by Thoth the first Hermes, which were afterwards translated into Greek, and deposited in books in the Egyptian temples, and which the learned supposed to be sacred characters.