visions is sufficient to set forth clearly the subordinate part they have played in human affairs. War and devastation have been the sphere in which their activity has chiefly manifested itself. Some of them have shown for a time no mean capacity in governing and managing their conquests. But they have had no aptitude for helping the advance of civilization, and but little, in general, even for appropriating the knowledge and culture of their subjects or their neighbours. The Manchus have written their language during some centuries past; but they have nothing which deserves the name of a national literature; their books are translations or servile imitations of Chinese works. The Mongol literature goes back to the thirteenth century, the period when the race rose to importance in history, but is almost equally scanty. The Mongol alphabet was the original of the present Manchu, and, in its turn, was derived from that of the Uigur Turks; the latter, again, goes back to the Syriac, having been brought into central Asia by Nestorian missionaries. The Uigurs, the easternmost members of the family of Turkish tribes, seem to have been the first among them to acquire and use the art of writing; their alphabet is said to be mentioned in Chinese annals of the fifth century, and their reputation for learning won them consideration and high employment even down to the era of the Mongolian outbreak; but they, their civilization, and their literature have since passed so nearly out of existence that it has even been possible to raise the question whether they were, in fact, of Turkish kindred and speech. Very scanty fragments of what are supposed to have been their literary productions, of uncertain age, are still preserved to us. The general conversion of the Turkish tribes to Mohammedanism led to the crowding out of their ancient alphabet by the Arabic. From the south-eastern division of the same branch, generally called the Jagataic, or Oriental Turkish, we have a literature of some value, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but not continued later: its most important work is the autobiography of the emperor Baber, that extraordinary man who early in the sixteenth century conquered India, founding there the Mogul dynasty, the final
