dic, feeding their flocks in desert places--now settled, and
cultivating the earth, and filling their land with populous
villages, and towns, and fenced cities--then spreading themselves,
impelled by the love of glory and zeal of proselytism, over distant
countries; the other, reposing ever in luxurious ease and wealth on
the rich soil, watered by their slimy river, never quitting it for
a foreign clime or displaying, unless forced, the least change in
their position or habits of life. The intellectual character, the
metaphysical belief, and the religious sentiments and practices of
the two nations were equally diverse; one adoring an invisible and
eternal spirit, at whose almighty word the universe started into
existence, and 'the morning stars sang together, and the sons of
God shouted for joy;' the other adorning splendid temples with
costly magnificence, in which, with mysterious and grotesque rites,
they paid a strange and portentous worship to some foul and
grovelling object--a snake, a tortoise, a crocodile, or an ape. The
destiny of the two races has been equally different: both may be
said still to exist; one in their living representatives, their
ever-roving, energetic descendants; the other reposing in their own
land--a vast sepulchre, where the successive generations of thirty
centuries, all embalmed, men, women, and children, with their
domestic animals, lie beneath their dry preserving soil, expecting
vainly the summons to judgment--the fated time for which is to some
of them long past--before the tribunal of Sarapis, or in the hall
of Osymandyas."

We are far from agreeing with this estimate of the ancient Egyptians.
Their progress in mechanical arts, their hieroglyphical literature, and
even their theology, with its mystic trine, marked them as a people far
surpassing their contemporaries; and they were not the less great
because their greatness is now extinct. The Arian{C} tribes, though
unskilled in many of the most useful arts of life, yet had--

"National poetry, and a culture of language and thought, altogether
surprising when compared with their external condition and habits.
They had bards or scalds, _vates_, who were supposed, under divine
impulse, to celebrate the history of ancient times, and connect
them with revelations of the future, and with a refi