were as great or greater under these kings of Memphis and Sais, but the public spirit and virtue of the people were less; and much of that wealth which had before raised the great temples of Thebes was then spent in the hire of Greek mercenaries to surround a throne which native courage alone was no longer able to guard. The sovereigns were almost Greeks. It was then that Egypt was first open to Greek travellers, and the Greek philosophers eagerly sought from the Egyptian priests a knowledge of their famed science. The great names of Plato, who studied at Heliopolis, of Solon and Pythagoras, who had visited the Delta still earlier, and of many others of less note, prove how ready Greece then was to learn from Egypt.

During the next two hundred years, beginning with the conquest of the country by Cambyses, Egypt was mostly a province of Persia, and when not smarting under the tyranny of a foreign satrap was suffering as severely from its own half-successful attempts to regain its freedom. In these struggles between the Egyptians and their conquerors both parties trusted much to the courage of Greek mercenaries and allies; the Athenians were ranged on one side and the Spartans on the other; Persians and Egyptians had both placed the sword in the hands of the Greeks; and hence, when the power of Macedonia rose over the rest of Greece, when the Greek mercenaries flocked to the standard of Alexander, he found little difficulty in adding Persia, and its tributary province Egypt, to the rest of his conquests.

For three hundred years after the Macedonian conquest Egypt was an independent Greek kingdom, and nearly as remarkable for wealth and power under Ptolemy and his descendants, as it had been under its native sovereigns, and that at a time respecting which the faint traditions of consular Rome do not deserve the name of history. Though the Nubian gold mines were no longer worth working, the noarded wealth of the country was by no means exhausted.

It is not as the birthplace of art and science alone that Egypt now claims our attention. No sooner did Greece itself sink than Greek literature took refuge in Alexandria. Philosophy then became coloured with the mysticism of Egypt, and literature was waited on by its criticism. To the Alexandrian copiers and libraries we mainly owe our knowledge of the great Greek writers and our earliest manuscripts of the Bible; while whatever help we have received from grammarians and critics, whatever in history we have gained from chronology, in poetry from prosody, in geography from mathematics, in medicine from anatomy, was first taught in Alexandria. Its public library was the admiration of the world. But Alexandria may be pointed to as a warning that it is possible to cultivate the intellect without raising man's moral worth; and after a reign or two we find that every public virtue was wanting among its citizens, while vice and luxury rioted in the palace. Every succeeding Ptolemy seemed worse than his father; till Cleopatra, the last sovereign of that remarkable family, unable to quell the rebellion of her Alexandrian subjects, yielded up her person and her capital to each Roman general who in his turn seemed able to uphold her power.

For nearly seven centuries more, to the end of this history, Egypt was governed by the Romans, or, to speak more strictly, for three centuries and a half by Rome, and for three centuries and a half by Constantinople, but always through the means of the Greek colonists in Alexandria. During most of these unhappy years, notwithstanding the introduction of Christianity, both the Alexandrian Greeks and the Egyptians were sinking in everything that makes a nation great or a people happy. The ancient learning fell with paganism, while the superstition still lived to mix itself with the religion of Jesus. Frequent rebellions and the inroads of the Arabs added to the weakness and misery of the province.

After the rise of Christianity, Alexandria no longer played that second part only in civilisation, nor furnished the handmaid sciences alone, but had its own schools in philosophy, and gave birth to sects in religion. In Alexandria took place that important union between Judaism and Platonism which should receive careful attention in the history of philosophy and of the human mind. Hence the Jewish Scriptures became first known to the pagans, and the doctrine of one God was perhaps less unwillingly listened tc by them in consequence of its being united to some of their own philosophical opinions. The pagans were beginning to drop their polytheism, as Platonism appeared in the writings of the Jews; and both may thereby have been at the same time better fitted for the truths of Christianity. The later Platonists of Alexandria have perhaps hardly had justice done them by the moderns, either in regard to the improvement which they wrought in paganism, or the share which they have had in forming the present opinions of the world. Taking the doctrine of Plato as the foundation, borrowing something from the Jews and something from the other sects of pagans, they formed a philosophical religion, which we may think of little worth when offered as the rival of Christianity, but which we ought to admire as surpassing any other sect of paganism.

In Gnosticism we see another form of philosophy, an eastern mysticism, in which science was studied as a help to magic and divination; which had at the time, and no doubt still has, some share in moulding the opinions of Christians. It was common among the Jews at the time of the apostles; Paul censures it by name, and John indirectly. It was the parent, or perhaps the sister of Manicheism, and it has left its traces among several sects of Christians who seem to look for some other source for the origin of evil than the will of a benevolent Creator.

Among the three great families of Christianity, the Greek,

the Egyptian, and the Roman, the Egyptians often held the first place in importance. They were the first and chief corruptors of Christianity; and the history of wide-spreading error is hardly less important than the history of truth. The Egyptians were usually followed by the Romans as their pupils. The Egyptians long held the Nicene Creed against the Greek and Syrian churches; and though the opinions of modern Europe are in the first case to be traced up to Rome, yet, if we would carry back our search to their original source in Palestine, we must in most cases pass through Alexandria.

When the seat of empire was removed from Rome to Constantinople, and Alexandria lost its power over Egypt, the difference of religion between the two countries was the cause of a growing difficulty to the government. The Greeks of Alexandria, like the Protestants of Dublin, were of the same religion, politics, and blood as their rulers, and in a constant state of quarrel with their fellow-subjects. Sometimes an emperor like Zeno healed the disputes by treating both parties with equal justice. At other times, as under Theodosius, the country was governed according to the wishes of the less enlightened majority, and the Arian Greeks of Alexandria lost that ascendancy which they claimed as their birthright. But more often the emperors tried to govern the Egyptians by means of the favoured class; they goaded the people to rebellion by appointing to the churches and bishoprics and civil offices men whom the people hated as heretics and aliens; and at last the Egyptians, with an equal want of wisdom, threw themselves into the arms of their Arab neighbours, in hopes of regaining the government of their own church.

Thus Egypt, a country once the greatest in the world, but now to be counted among the least, gives us as many examples of what to shun as what to copy. On the banks of the Nile race after race has marked the high points to

which it reached by its inventions, its buildings, or its literature, and in its turn has fallen back again to vice and littleness. The ruined temples and now unmeaning pyramids lead us to inquire, why arts decay and empires crumble, why Heliopolis is no longer a seat of learning, and why the papyrus rush ceased to grow in the Delta? They remind us that no wealth, no arts, no literature, can save a nation from ruin, unless it has the wish to check its own vices.

Thus also History amuses us while it teaches; it withdraws the mind from the cares of the present to live in the quiet of the past, where we hear of troubles without being made anxious, because the events that are to follow are already known.

Few of us would wish the thread of a story broken to be told where it disagrees with that of a former author, but it may interest the reader of Gibbon to learn in what points the writer of these pages has ventured to differ from that great historian. It escaped Gibbon's accurate eye that, on the death of Aurelian, part at least of the Roman world was governed for several months in the name of his widow Severina;-compare page 236 of vol. ii. with Gibbon, chap. xii. He also omits the name of Vaballathus Athenodorus as a Roman emperor, who reigned for one year as Aurelian's colleague ;- -see page 233. He seems mistaken in believing with Dion Cassius, that when the quarrels broke out between the Jews and pagans in several cities in the first century, the unhappy Jews were the assailants;-compare page 106 with Gibbon, chap. xvi. Again, he too hastily follows Procopius rather than Theophanes and Nonnosus at the end of his chapter xlii.; he thus confounds the embassy of Julianus in the reign of Justin, with that of Nonnosus in the reign of Justinian;-see pages 345 and 353. Lastly, he makes a needless difficulty of Elagabalus, who reigned three