an historic fact of the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus.
He tells us how this huge beast, forty-five feet long, was beaten down
by troops of archers, slingers, and cavalry, and brought alive in a
net to Alexandria, where Eve's old enemy was shown in a cage for the
amusement of the curious citizens.

Memphis was then a great city; in its crowded streets, its palaces and
temples, it was second only to Alexandria. A little to the west stood
the pyramids, which were thought one of the seven wonders of the world.
Their broad bases, sloping sides, and solid masonry had withstood the
weather for ages; and their huge unwieldy stones were a less easy quarry
for after builders than the live rock when nearer to the river's side.
The priests of Memphis knew the names of the kings who, one after the
other, had built a new portico to their great temple of Phtah; but as to
when or by whom the pyramids were built, they had perhaps less knowledge
than the present day historian. The modern Egyptologist, with his
patient investigation, assigns the largest of these three pyramids to
Khufui or Kheops, a famous ruler of the fourth dynasty, and the others
were erected by his immediate successors. The temple of Phtah, and every
other building of Memphis, is now gone, and near the spot stands the
great city of Cairo, whose mosques and minarets have been quarried of
its ruins, but the pyramids still stand, after fifty-six centuries of
broken and changing history, unbroken and unchanged. They have outlived
any portion of time that their builders could have dreamed of, but their
worn surface no longer declares to us their builders' names and history.
Their sloping sides, formed to withstand attacks, have not saved the
inscriptions which they once held; and the builders, in thus overlooking
the reed which was growing in their marshes, the papyrus, to which the
great minds of Greece afterwards trusted their undying names, have only
taught us how much safer it would have been, in their wish to be
thought of and talked of in after ages, to have leaned upon the poet and
historian.

The beautiful temples of Dendera and Latopolis, which were raised by the
untiring industry of ages and finished, under the Roman emperors, were
begun about this reign. Though some of the temples of Lower Egypt had
fallen into decay; and though the throne was then tottering to its fall,
the priests in Upper Egypt were still building for immortality. The
religion of the Kopts w