vast quantity of canals, it shows a quickness and exuberance of vegetation scarcely to be equalled elsewhere. I have walked, during the greater part of to-day, along its border, on the right bank of the stream. Here, for four hundred years, the children of Israel dwelt, and, numbering seventy souls at their first settlement, multiplied till they filled the land. Yet, fertile as its soil, and glorious its clime, here was not their rest; they dwelt still as 66 strangers in the land of Egypt: The earnestness with which the wandering tribes looked towards the promised country, the inheritance given by God to their fathers, is strongly testified in the dying charge of Jacob to his favourite son: "Deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt: but I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their burying-place. And he said, I will do as thou hast said. And he said, Swear unto me. And he sware unto him.” * So, when the time drew near that Joseph also must die, he exacted an equally solemn pledge from his brethren: "I die; and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which He sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob . . . and ye shall carry up my bones from hence."† It is now just about the period of the spring,

*Genesis xlvii. 29.

+ Genesis 1. 24.

I

corre

when "the barley is in the ear," sponding to the season at which the Almighty poured forth His judgments to abase the pride and to punish the cruelty of the Egyptians; and to deliver triumphantly from their "house of bondage" His people whom He had chosen to preserve the knowledge of the true God in the world, and to hand down to us the revelation of His will.*

Samanoul may be considered the voyager's cond stage in the descent of the Damiatic anch. It is on the site of the ancient Sebennytus, on the left bank of the river, and is still a considerable town, with some good paved streets and well-built houses,

*Note. There is, perhaps, nothing more monstrous in all the idolatrous rites of the ancient Egyptians, than the imagination conceived by a writer of the nineteenth century, that they are the source whence the nations of the earth have derived enlightened ideas respecting religious worship and the nature of man. Such hypothesis appears to be intimately allied with another, its only parallel in absurdity, which has been taken up by an author, also of the present age, who is at great pains to trace the descent of the race to which he belongs from a monkey-original; and who, in order to be consistent with his own theory, ought, as a critic observes, "to regard the monkey department in all zoological collections with feelings of profound veneration." It is certain that the ape was a prominent object of adoration among the Egyptians; though I think that Juvenal was mistaken in calling their idol "cercopithecus," which is a long-tailed species. He adopted the word, probably, as a good one to round off a hexameter. Ancient sculptures rather show that the animal specially idolized in Egypt was cynocephalus," the dog-faced baboon, Milton's "dog Anubis." -London, October 25, 1851.

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and a regular bazaar, in which the tailors, smiths, shoe-dealers, and other trades, have their several distinct departments. A Frank traveller must be a rare sight to the inhabitants, if I may judge from the curiosity with which they crowded round me at a shop where I stopped to purchase some dates, loading me with attentions too familiar to be pleasant. The appearance of the population is disagreeable from the prevalence of ophthalmia among them. This scourge of Egypt has been by some attributed mainly to the great change of temperature which takes place between the intense heat of the day, and the chill of the night arising from the copious dews. I believe, however, that the filth of the people has a great share in producing the disease. I saw to-day several children whose eyes appeared never to have been washed, and were buried in a mass of flies that had fastened on them. Samanoul

affords, however, on the whole, a good place of repose and refreshment to the traveller, and, in particular, an excellent Turkish bath, which I found a more handsome and comfortable establishment of the kind than any with which I became acquainted in Cairo.

Before arriving here, about three miles higher up the stream, I landed at the village of Busyr, and ascended a lofty mound of ruins. The tradition of the name strongly marks it as the site of the ancient Busiris,

distinguished by its magnificent temple of Isis. The objection which has been raised against its identity, from the vicinity to Samanoul, and the unlikelihood that two cities so important should have existed so near to each other, seems to be a weak and insufficient argument.

Mansoureh.

Sunday, March 25th.—This is a town still larger in extent than Samanoul, and much its superior in legendary interest. Saint Louis, leading his soldiers of the Cross, A.D. 1249, to the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, and thinking fit to begin his enterprise by attempting the conquest of Egypt, gained Damiat, little prepared for resistance, almost without a blow; but at Mansoureh the flower of his army, confident and rash, flushed by their first success, fell before the troops of the Egyptian Sultan. The French monarch himself, on his retreat to Damiat, was taken prisoner, but admitted to ransom. I have seen the spot near Tunis where Saint Louis, having persevered in a new crusade, A.D. 1270, and again foiled, found a last refuge from the reverses of life. There is some resemblance between the fate which awarded to a sovereign of France, in the thirteenth century, a solitary grave on an African promontory, and that which, in our own times, consigned Napoleon, whose gions had likewise trodden these banks

of Nile, to his rocky tomb at St. Helena. Some of the "savants" who accompanied the French expedition in 1798, argued that the signs here shown by the Almighty, "His wonders in the field of Zoan," were merely events in the common course of nature that the annoyances of lice and flies, for example, the boils and cutaneous eruptions, mentioned in the book of Exodus, were no more than the similar "plagues of Egypt" in the present day. If an English author has, unhappily, borrowed this notion from the French writers, it must be confessed that he has been so far from adopting at the same time the sprightliness and attraction of manner which makes their works dangerous, that he has, in great measure, neutralized the mischief by the dulness and heaviness of a style all his own.

On landing at the town, I learnt from an Arab that a Maltese (" Maltyi") resides in it. Taking my informant for a guide, we found, after some difficulty, a man in European dress, engaged in building a boat, which is his trade. His name is Rosar, and he has dwelt in Mansoureh fifteen years. He tells me that there is another Frank resident here, an Italian medical attendant on the Governor. My Arab guide put the question to me several times on our way: "Inti rassoul?" which puzzled me a little at first, as I took it to mean-" Art thou a prophet?" He in