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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
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