ome part
of the vegetable kingdom enjoyed either a national or a local sanctity.
Gods it was said grew in the gardens. The most cogent reasons of policy
and the terrible name of Rome failed to save from death the Roman who
had killed a cat. Fancy had first assigned to each god his favorites or
symbols among beasts or plants. Then the beasts and plants themselves
were reverenced, and at last worshipped. Stately avenues of colossal
statues, magnificent porticoes and columned courts ushered the
awe-stricken devotee into the sacred presence of an ibis or an ape. The
highest object of this superstition, the bull Apis, was regarded as an
actual incarnation of Osiris. No rational account of such a system can
be given. The serpent cannot have been respected for its utility. The
ibis cannot have been honored as the destroyer of the sacred serpent.
Nothing divine can have been perceived in the beetle or the ape. The
connection between the god and the beast was originally the offspring of
a grotesque imagination, and priestcraft and the superstitious tendency
of the people did the rest.

"The political constitution of Egypt was based on caste. The privileged
castes were those of the warriors and the priests, who, with the
Pharaoh, held in fee all the land of Egypt. The Government was an
hereditary monarchy. When election was necessary the two privileged
castes chose from among their own numbers; the people enjoyed only the
right of acclamation. If the choice fell on a warrior, he was at once
received into the order and initiated into the wisdom of the priests.
Legislation was the prerogative of the King; but he was bound to rule
and judge according to the law. He was much in the hands of the priests,
who imposed strict rules upon his life, and by a daily homily made the
duties and virtues of sovereignty familiar, perhaps too familiar, to the
royal ear. The priests, in fact, were the lords of Egypt. Exclusively
possessed of science, and even of letters, numerous, wealthy, united, in
a single polity, a confined territory and an isolated people, unchecked
by any literary, philosophical, or foreign influence, they must have
exercised a dominion unrivalled by any priesthood in the history of the
world. The result was a land of temples, of deified apes and consecrated
onions, a literature of religious inscriptions and funeral scrolls, a
Government apparently mild and humane, an enduring polity and long
internal peace, and intense and st