roceedings, and where the authorities watch with
the most jealous care over everything relating to the historical
traditions and monuments of antiquity. It would be very difficult to
explain how the missionaries could have been bold enough to have
printed and published in China, and in Chinese, an inscription that had
never existed, and how they could have imitated the Chinese style,
counterfeited the manner of the writers of the dynasty of Thang,
alluded to customs little known, to local circumstances, to dates
calculated from the mysterious figures of Chinese astrology, and the
whole without betraying themselves for a moment; and with such
perfection as to impose on the most skilful men of letters, induced, of
course, by the singularity of the discovery to dispute its
authenticity. It could only have been done by one of the most erudite
of Chinese scholars, joining with the missionaries to impose on his own
countrymen."

"Even that would not be all, for the borders of the inscription are
covered with Syrian names in fine _estranghelo_ characters. The forgers
must, then, have been not only acquainted with these characters, but
have been able to get engraved with perfect exactness ninety lines of
them, and in the ancient writing, known at present to very few."

"This argument of Remusat's," says another learned Orientalist, M.
Felix Neve, "is of irresistible force, and we have formerly heard a
similar one maintained with the greatest confidence by M. Quatremere,
of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, and we allow
ourselves to quote the opinion of so highly qualified a judge upon this
point. Before the last century it would have been absolutely impossible
to forge in Europe a series of names and titles belonging to a
Christian nation of Western Asia; it is only since the fruits of
Assemam's labors have been made public by his family at Rome, that
there existed a sufficient knowledge of the Syriac for such a purpose;
and it is only by the publication of the manuscripts of the Vatican,
that the extent to which Nestorianism spread in the centre of Asia, and
the influence of its hierarchy in the Persian provinces could have been
estimated. There is no reason to suppose that missionaries who left
Europe in the very beginning of the seventeenth century could have
acquired a knowledge which could only be obtained