edon. A thousand years were now elapsed
since Egypt had ceased to be a kingdom, since the conquerors of Asia and
Europe had trampled on the ready necks of a people, whose ancient wisdom
and power ascend beyond the records of history. The conflict of zeal
and persecution rekindled some sparks of their national spirit. They
abjured, with a foreign heresy, the manners and language of the Greeks:
every Melchite, in their eyes, was a stranger, every Jacobite a citizen;
the alliance of marriage, the offices of humanity, were condemned as a
deadly sin the natives renounced all allegiance to the emperor; and
his orders, at a distance from Alexandria, were obeyed only under the
pressure of military force. A generous effort might have edeemed the
religion and liberty of Egypt, and her six hundred monasteries might
have poured forth their myriads of holy warriors, for whom death should
have no terrors, since life had no comfort or delight. But experience
has proved the distinction of active and passive courage; the fanatic
who endures without a groan the torture of the rack or the stake, would
tremble and fly before the face of an armed enemy. The pusillanimous
temper of the Egyptians could only hope for a change of masters; the
arms of Chosroes depopulated the land, yet under his reign the Jacobites
enjoyed a short and precarious respite. The victory of Heraclius renewed
and aggravated the persecution, and the patriarch again escaped from
Alexandria to the desert. In his flight, Benjamin was encouraged by
a voice, which bade him expect, at the end of ten years, the aid of a
foreign nation, marked, like the Egyptians themselves, with the ancient
rite of circumcision. The character of these deliverers, and the nature
of the deliverance, will be hereafter explained; and I shall step over
the interval of eleven centuries to observe the present misery of the
Jacobites of Egypt. The populous city of Cairo affords a residence, or
rather a shelter, for their indigent patriarch, and a remnant of ten
bishops; forty monasteries have survived the inroads of the Arabs; and
the progress of servitude and apostasy has reduced the Coptic nation to
the despicable number of twenty-five or thirty thousand families; [148]
a race of illiterate beggars, whose only consolation is derived from
the superior wretchedness of the Greek patriarch and his diminutive
congregation. [149]

[Footnote 148: This number is taken from the curious Recherches sur
les Eg