under the largest water tank. On search there were found there fifty-three large measures (more than twelve millions of denarii) of coined gold.

On the whole the Egyptians were mildly treated, and so they did not fear building close to the skirts of the garrison town. Thirty-seven years after the foundation of that place, so many Copts had settled in it that the Governor Maslema had to permit them to build a church of their own. Fostat and Babylon got completely united, and the new place soon became the central seat of the Government, and by its fresh energetic growth cast the venerable, but back-going and age-enfeebled, Memphis on the other bank of the Nile completely into the shade. The celebrated city of the Pyramids had been a populous Court city down to the end of the reign of the Ptolemies, and even under the Romans and Byzantines it might still be called a great town. But its old fame was gone; Christianity had dispersed the great fraternities of heathen priests; and Egyptian learning, which had been cultivated for thousands of years in the temples of Ptah, Imhotep, and other divinities, had lost its peculiar character; it had, in great part, perished altogether, and where it was still cultivated by individuals, had accommodated itself to circumstances by the assumption of new forms. Greek art had completely supplanted the old national Egyptian; Alexandria had absorbed the trade of Memphis; and what Alexandria left of it was diverted by the new and active town on the other bank of the river. The sinking man always makes for the side of the strong swimmer, and so it came about that the Memphites left their own declining town in thousands, and sought for more favourable conditions of life in Fostat. The excellent Arabic writer, 'Abdellatif († 1232), found on the site of Memphis nothing but deserted ruins; but these remains were still so extensive that he calls them a world of walls, which confused the mind and baffled the descriptive powers of even the most accomplished writer. He concludes, from a glance at the popular belief, that the ancient Egyptians were long-lived giants, who were able to move heavy blocks of stone from one spot to another by the use of their magical wands. The only inhabitants of these ruins are said to have been bands of robbers, who were employed by commercial companies to search the fallen edifices and vaults for gold, silver, and other treasures.

Memphis soon sank into complete oblivion; even her wonderful ruins disappeared from the earth, and to-day green asters and palmgroves occupy the place where once stood one of the most ancient and celebrated cities of the world. Only the monuments in the city of the dead, the great graveyard of the Memphites, many miles long, have escaped destruction. The city of the living, the colossal temples of their gods, the "white walls" of the famous fort of the town, and

the other public buildings which once raised proud heads, have vanished from the face of the earth. The rapidly extending Cairo needed hewn stones, freestones, and columns, and the devastated. Memphis was the rich quarry from whence she got them. The same fate befell Heliopolis on the same bank of the river, to the north of the new metropolis. This famous city of scholars, the centre of Egyptian sunworship, has also disappeared from the earth, and was already in the time of El-Makrizi († 1442) no more than a country town containing some ruins of dismantled sanctuaries. A great part of the obelisks brought from the Nile to the countries of Western Europe originally stood in this place, in front of the gateways of the temples of the Sun; and among others, the so-called Cleopatra's Needle, now in London, and its twin-sister, transported to America. Hewn stones were easily carried to Fostat by water, or by the old road which connected Heliopolis with Memphis through Babylon; and so one may assume that the houses and palaces of this town rest in good part on ancient Egyptian foundations. More than one building has been discovered in Cairo containing stones inscribed with hieroglyphics. Among these a mighty Stele (stone table) of black granite, that was found during the excavations made at the foundation of a house that was pulled down, acquired special celebrity. It contains a perfectly uninjured inscription, which was devoted to the honour of Ptolemy Soter before his official recognition as successor of Alexander II., and establishes by first-hand evidence that he restored to the priests of this place the lands in the northern part of the Delta that had been taken from the temple of Bulo; other stones, carved with hieroglyphics, were appropriated in the building of mosques; and who has visited the mosques of Cairo, and not observed the great number of pillars from old heathen buildings that are employed in their construction?

In the mosque of 'Amr, the oldest in all Egypt, stands a forest of pillars. Every one of them supports a capital, which owes its origin to Greek, Roman, and Byzantine masons. Most of these appear to have come from Memphis. It is remarkable that the Arabs have nowhere made use of pillars fashioned in the old Egyptian style, although they could have found them in any quantity they liked at Memphis and Hieropolis. They must have been thoroughly against their taste, for the simple reason that they imitated the forms of plants, and their religion forbade all recognizable likenesses of organic beings. But they could bear with pleasure the sight of Greek and Roman pillars of the most variegated form.

The Moslem ruled the land, and Fostat was a genuine Moslem town; but the Arab understood how to turn to account the superior knowledge and capacity of his numerous Egyptian fellow-citizens. They were superior to him in numbers, and many of them were

scholars, immigrants from Memphis and Heliopolis, who went over to the new religion, and, as Moslems among Moslems, continued their scientific labours and worked as teachers.

The wonderfully quick apprehension, and the keen, nimble mind of the Arab, enabled him to appropriate rapidly the scientific treasures he found among the conquered Egyptians. The Moslems not only acquired foreign learning, but assimilated it to their own ways of thought, and followed out every discipline that seemed to them worth working at, with success, energy, and intellectual acuteness.

Just as their towns and mosques had a character of their own, although they were put together for the most part out of stones and building materials that owed their origin to foreign art, so their science may be said to be genuinely Arabic, although it can be shown that here, too, the stately ship has been built from planks found ready made at Egyptian wharves. Of course the arcana of Egyptian science had long since grown less and less, for Greek learning was deeply studied in the Nile Valley, and cast the priestly wisdom of the age of the Pharaohs into the shade. But precisely in the sphere of the so-called exact sciences to which the Arabs devoted themselves with preference, the Egyptians at the time of the foundation of Fostat had still much material in the form of traditions, although they had for centuries abandoned their obsolete complicated system of writing and had accustomed themselves to the use of Greek letters. Even the rude speech of earlier times was essentially altered and enriched by Greek words. The Coptic, a dialect whose syntactic pureness delights the linguist, stepped into the place of her mother, the ancient Egyptian; but every educated Copt was able also to speak Greek, and the libraries of Memphis could not have been wanting in the most eminent works of Greek literature.

This is no mere guess, for if fragments of a great library, including Greek MSS., which do not seem to have been produced very long before the foundation of Fostat, have been found in the unimportant Krokodilopolis in Fajjum, and parts of the "Iliad," and of the lyric poet Alkman, in the neighbourhood of a small town in Middle Egypt, then it may be safely assumed that libraries full of Greck MSS. must have existed in the half Hellenic metropolis, Memphis. The treasures of the famous Alexandrian library were destroyed, sold to Constantinople, stolen, and scattered long before 'Amr came to Egypt. The famous story that this commander heated the baths of the town with costly books, because they deserved destruction if they taught anything different from the Koran, and were unnecessary if they taught the faith, belongs demonstrably to the region of fable.

GEORG EBERS.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF:

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN THREE RATIONALISTS.

A

ND finally," asked Vere, "what do you think is likely to have been the result of Monsignore's wonderful sermon ?" He had gone to meet his two friends in the late summer afternoon; and as they walked slowly towards the old farm on the brink of the common, they had been giving him an account of the sermon which they had just been to hear; a sermon probably intended to overcome the last scruples of one Protestant in particular, a lady on a visit to the neighbouring Catholic Earl, but ostensibly delivered for the benefit of Protestants in general-that is to say, of as many countryfolk and stray visitors as could be collected in the chapel of Rother Castle.

"The result," answered Rheinhardt with that indefinable cosmopolitan accent, neither French nor German, which completed the sort of eighteenth-century, citizen-of-the-world character of the great archæologist; "the result," answered Rheinhardt, "is that Baldwin and I have spent a most delightful and instructive afternoon, and that you would have done so too, Vere, had you not scornfully decided that no Catholicism more recent than that of St. Theresa deserved the attention of the real æsthetic pessimist.'

""

Vere laughed. "What I want to know is, whether you suppose that. Monsignore has succeeded in making another convert ?"

"I think he must have succeeded," answered Baldwin; "he had evidently brought that soul to the very brink of the ditch which separates Protestantism from Catholicism; his object was to make the passage quite insensible, to fill up the ditch so that its presence could not be perceived. He tried to make it appear to Protestant listeners that Catholicism was not at all the sort of foreign, illiberal, frog-eating, Guy-Fawkesy bugbear of their fancy; but,

on the contrary, the simple, obvious, liberal, modern, eminently English form of belief which they think they have got (but in their hearts must have felt that they have not) in Protestantism. And I really never saw anything more ingenious than the way in which, without ever mentioning the words Catholicism or Protestantism, Monsignore contrived to leave the impression that a really sincere Protestant is already more than half a Catholic. I assure you that, if it had not been for the awful sixpenny chromo-lithographs of the Passion, the bleeding wooden Christs, the Madonnas in muslin frocks and spangles, and all the pious tawdriness which makes Rother Chapel look like some awful Belgian or Bavarian church, I might almost have believed, for the moment, that the lady in question would do very wisely to turn Catholic."

"I wonder whether she will?" mused Vere, as they walked slowly across the yielding turf of the common, which seemed in its yellow greenness to be saturated with the gleams of sunshine, breaking ever and anon through the film of white cloud against which stood out the dark and massive outline of the pine clumps, the ghost-like array of the larches, and the pale-blue undulation of the distant downs.

"She may or she may not," answered Rheinhardt," that is no concern of mine, any more than what becomes of the actors after an amusing comedy. What is it to us unbelievers whether one more mediocrity be lost by Protestantism and gained by Catholicism? "Tis merely the juggler's apple being transferred from the right hand to the left; we may amuse ourselves watching it dancing up and down, and from side to side, and wondering where it will reappear next; that's all."

Vere was fully accustomed, after their three weeks' solitude together, correcting proofs and composing lectures in this southcountry farm, to Rheinhardt's optimistic Voltairean levity, his sheer incapacity of conceiving that religion could be a reality to any one, his tendency to regard abstract discussion merely as a delightful exercise for the aristocracy of the intellect, quite apart from any effect upon the thoughts or condition of the less gifted majority. He admired and pitied Rheinhardt, and let himself be amused by his kindly sceptical narrowmindedness.

"Poor woman!" replied Vere," it does seem a little hard that her soul should be merely an apple to be juggled with for the amusement of Professor Rheinhardt. But, after all, I agree with you that it is of no consequence to us whether she turn Catholic or remain Protestant. The matter concerns only herself, and all is right as long as she settles down in the faith best adapted to her individual spiritual wants. There ought to be as many different religions as there are different sorts of character-religions and irreligions, of course; for I think you, Rheinhardt, would have been miserable had you lived before the