approves of a culture which defies ?

Greek writers ascribe to the women of various Eastern countries, at this period, prerogatives which would in vain be sought among the institutions of the same region in modern times;* and Herodotus observes that, "among various nations of Africa, the rank of nobility descended in the female line, so that the children of a noble Lydian woman inherited the nobility of their mother's caste, even when the father was a plebeian or a slave.”

But, amidst these débris of the history of undated times, through which fragments of a legislation favourable to woman's rights are most apparent, one mighty monument stands out in the institutions of Egypt, a moral pyramid, raised to the honour of the sex by the most highly organized of races!

Egypt, that land where man was wisest,-Egypt, from whose intellectual firest Greece and Rome borrowed the lights, by which worlds then unguessed at, and races then unknown, have since learned the laws of Nature and the philosophy of morals,-Egypt, from her remotest existence, assumed the female form, as the representative of a superintending Providence; and gave to Isis a homage, which the assigned co-partner of her divinity, Osiris, never received.

The image of a young mother, with a child on her bosom, Isis, suckling the infant Horus, was to the initiated of the Egyptians a personification of Nature; or rather, this worship offered to the " queen of Heaven," the "mother of the universe," of "gods and men,"‡ was addressed to the great source of the imperishable elements, the essence of life itself;§ a pure theism, at variance with the gross and sensual idolatry of the people. After an interval of many thousand years, the sublime fragments of the Temple of Tentyra, as they rise, in their ruined

*Meiners, vol. i.

In the Egyptian Pantheon, Athor, Neith, and Isis, are placed in equality with Osiris, Amon, and Anubis.

Athor and Isis, the one so often named the other the "mother of the universe."

queen of Heaven," the

If Neith be one of the forms of Isis, as the inscription on her statue at Sais presumes, she must, in antiquity and importance, have presided at the head of all the gods of Egypt, as the Brahmins placed Bhavanie, the Indian Venus, at the head of their theology. See St. John's Travels in Egypt.

magnificence, on the boundless horizon of the vast and dreary solitudes they glorify, attest to this day the religious associations of the Egyptians with their reverence for motherhood-a reverence with which the Israelites so often reproached their old taskmasters!

The capitals of the columns of the Temple of Isis, still undefaced, represent the bright countenance of a woman (four times repeated), which, irradiated with smiles, meets the eye, from whatever side it is gazed on; and in the sculpture of its still beautiful Propylon are traced religious festivals and processions, in which women, all softness in their expression, with children at their bosoms, are the images most frequently repeated.*

It may have been from the exalted rank given to Isis in the Egyptian mythology, that the women of that country attained that high consideration, which opened the book of knowledge to their perusal, which gave them the privileges of citizens, which brought the graces of their minds and persons into the most intellectual circles of Memphis and Alexandria, and which, leaving Salic laws "undreamed of in the philosophy" of the most philosophical, shared the rites and duties and occupations of husbands and fathers with their wives and mothers. tradition and history are to be credited, this prestige in favour of female intellect gave to the female sovereigns of Egypt a power which the male successors of the Pharaohs or the Ptolemies never enjoyed,

If

But, though the sovereign power thus ascribed to the queens of Egypt (by Herodotus), over their people and their husbands, should be but a traditional exaggeration, and, though the gallantry of Egyptian lawgivers should never have gone to the extent of "obliging the husband to pledge himself that he would be obedient to his wife,"† still, the very exaggeration, (if it be one,) establishes the fact of the high intellectual qualities called forth in the Egyptian women, by the wisdom of institutions, which

*This beautiful Propylon of the Temple of Tentyra is the Porch to which Ezekiel probably alluded, when he reproached the "dark idolatries of alienated Judah."

† Diodorus Siculus, 1, 127.

denied not to one half of the species the rights that God and nature had intended equally for both.*

But Egypt (an ancient state when Israel was but a nomade population) finally submitted to the common lot of all things earthly, of empires as of man, and sunk under the touch of political and moral degradation. The Roman eagle fluttered over "its cloud-capt towers and gorgeous palaces" over those time-honoured monuments, which still exist, enshrining history in tangible forms, and bearing evidence to facts, which prejudice can no longer refute, or scepticism deny. One only Egyptian was then found, whose character and actions recalled something of the recorded grandeur of Sesostris, and the national pride of the Pharaohs. This one was a woman, of Greek descent, indeed, but of Egyptian parentage, birth, and associations.

Egypt had already shared the fate of her ancient contemporary empires; the throne of the Pharaohs had received a new power. The corruption of morals and manners introduced by its Greek masters, and by the scourging tyranny of the Ptolemies, had changed much of the national character, and dried up those sources of sensibility, which originated the ancient religion of poetry and affec tion, and so long contributed to the intellectual temperament of the people. In this revolution, the highly organized race of women, the descendants of the venerated mothers of the kings of Memphis, shared the common fate. There were still, however, in the land of the Arsinoest and Berenices, some great, if not many good women, who long continued influential over the public interests of Egypt, through their energies, their ambition, their pride, and their patriotism.

The successive Cleopatras, though sometimes branded

* In evidence of the social position of woman in Egypt, it is scarcely necessary to point out one of the most remarkable and splendid works of the present day:-"The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, by Sir J. G. Wilkinson."

The first Arsinoe was the wife of Ptolemy Trypho, or the effeminate, who owed the little glory he won, and the power he possessed, to her. She headed his armies, governed the people, and, by her courage and her manœuvres, checked the progress of Antiochus, and for a time saved Egypt.

by crimes, (but too coincident with the times, the men, and the circumstances, of a rapidly disorganizing commu. nity), exhibited powerful capacities, strong abilities, and a firmness of purpose wanting to their sons and husbands, which, though often directed to evil, still for a time preserved the national unity and the independence of their country.

The first and worst of these Cleopatras, was the bold, bad, ambitious rival of the beautiful Rodogune, (the subject of a drama* as immortal as her wrongs):-the last and greatest of the Cleopatras was she who closed the heroic history of her country with her own. The glory of Egypt, and the intellectual powers of her women, sunk together in the tomb of the daughter and successor of Ptolemy Auletes. Accused, by the eulogists and parasites of her enemies, of crimes most prevalent in the age and in the caste to which she belonged, the halo of her patriotism still threw a redeeming light over the shadow of her faults, brightening, if it did not efface them. Cleopatra loved Egypt better than the Cæsars loved Rome, and struggled to the last for the independence of her country, as they had done against the liberty of theirs. Opposed to the most able and powerful men that ever lived, she finally conquered the world's conquerors, by the brilliant qualities of her mind, and the seductive influence of her charms. She successively subdued Julius, enslaved Antony, and outwitted Augustus. When proclaimed the partner of the Imperator of Rome, and when her statue was placed in the temple of its gods, she only used her power over the hearts of "the world's great masters," to save Egypt and to increase its dominions.† From a fugitive princess, wronged, friendless, dethroned, and hunted to the death by unnatural kindred, she made herself an independent sovereign queen, and raised the decaying capital of her kingdom to be the intellectual metropolis of the universe; a shrine to which the wise men of all nations brought their tributes.

Never was Egypt so rich in wealth, power, and civili

* By Corneille.

+ By the addition of Cyprus, Cilicia, Judea, and Syria.

sation, as under the reign of this last of its queens, who made knowledge the basis of national supremacy,* who reconstructed that precious library, which man in his madness had destroyed; and who, when the treasures of the Roman empire were made disposable at her will, (by the prodigality of the enamoured Antony) replied to his offers:-"the treasures I want are two hundred thousand volumes from Pergamus, for my library of Alexandria."

Cleopatra encouraged science, loved the arts, cultivated letters, and was irresistibly eloquent in seven different languages, all of which she spoke with the purity of her mother tongue; and, although Lacan, the most pompous poet of the declining literature of Rome, reviles the conqueress of the Cæsars, and reproaches her for the undue influence of charms which placed his imperial patrons at her feet, still the "feralis Erinnys," "the fury of Rome," was the protectress of Egypt, which continued to hold on high its lotus-crowned crest, so long as Cleopatra lived. Her kingdom sunk not to the degradation of a Roman province, until the voluntary and heroic death of its champion queen disappointed the ostentatious hopes of Augustus, and deprived the land of the wisest, of the most patriotic of her sovereigns, and the last of her great intel lectual illustrations.

Throughout the whole fragmentary history of the earliest peopled regions of the earth, this one great dogma is mystically attested, and made darkly visible, that at some period of the doubtful past the spiritual nature of woman struggled against the physical superiority of man! (an un

* A wreck of the learning and accomplishment of the Egyptian women may still be traced, in the degraded caste of "the Almé," (literally the learned.) "These Almés" (observes Meiners) “receive no female into their number but what has an agreeable voice, possesses some knowledge of rhetoric, and the rules of poetry, and a talent for extempore versification. These Almés know by heart the most beautiful elegies on the misfortunes of lovers, or the death of heroes, and by singing these compositions they melt even the obdurate Turks into tears."-Meiners, vol. 1, p. 155. Two Arabic songs composed by the Almé, and given by a recent Egyptian traveller, Mr. St. John, are full of poetry and feeling:

My heart is in the desert," is particularly beautiful.-"Osman Effendi," (says Mr. St. John) "who translated for me these scraps of poetry, compared the above song to an old Scotch ballad that he heard when he was in England:- My heart is in the Highlands.''