as having
commenced in his reign. His Eastern conquests were more specious than
solid, resulting in a nominal rather than a real subjection of Palestine
and Syria to his yoke. His subjects grew unaccustomed to the use of
arms during the last twenty, or five and twenty, years of his life.
Above all, luxury, intrigue, and superstition invaded the court, where
the eunuchs and concubines exercised a pernicious influence. Magic was
practised by some of the chief men in the State, and the belief was
widely spread that it was possible by charms, incantations, and the use
of waxen images, to bewitch men, or paralyse their limbs, or even to
cause their deaths. Hags were to be found about the court as wicked as
Canidia, who were willing to sell their skill in the black art to the
highest bidder. The actual person of the monarch was not sacred from the
plottings of this nefarious crew, who planned assassinations and hatched
conspiracies in the very purlieus of the royal palace. Ramesses himself
would, apparently, have fallen a victim to a plot of the kind, had not
the parties to it been discovered, arrested, tried by a Royal
Commission, and promptly executed.

The descendants of Ramesses III. occupied the throne from his death
(about B.C. 1280) to B.C. 1100. Ten princes of the name of Ramesses, and
one called Meri-Tum, bore sway during this interval, each of them
showing, if possible, greater weakness than the last, and all of them
sunk in luxury, idle, effeminate, sensual. Ramesses III. provoked
caricature by his open exhibition of harem-scenes on the walls of his
Medinet-Abou palace. His descendants, content with harem life, scarcely
cared to quit the precincts of the royal abode, desisted from all war,
and even devolved the task of government on other shoulders. The
Pharaohs of the twentieth dynasty became absolute _faineants_, and
devolved their duties on the high-priests of the great temple of Ammon
at Thebes, who "set themselves to play the same part which at a distant
period was played by the Mayors of the Palace under the later French
kings of the Merovingian line."

In an absolute monarchy, the royal authority is the mainspring which
controls all movements and all actions in every part of the State. Let
this source of energy grow weak, and decline at once shows itself
throughout the entire body politic. It is as when a fatal malady seizes
on the seat of life in an individual--instantly every member, every
tissue, falls