man yet,' he growled to himself, in an under voice, but what he disappointed me-and I must not expect more from this fellow. Come, men, ashore, and get drunk!'

Philammon, of course, now that he had leave to go, longed to stayat all events he must go back and thank his hosts. He turned unwillingly to do so, as hastily as he could, and found Pelagia and her gigantic lover just entering a palanquin. With downcast eyes he approached the beautiful basilisk, and stammered out some common-place; and she, full of smiles, turned to him at

once.

'Tell us more about yourself before we part. You speak such beautiful Greek-true Athenian. It is quite delightful to hear one's own accent again. Were you ever at Athens P'

'When I was a child; I recollect -that is, I think'

"What?' asked Pelagia, eagerly. 'A great house in Athens-and a great battle there-and coming to Egypt in a ship.'

Heavens ! said Pelagia, and paused..... How strange! Girls, who said he was like me?"

'I'm sure we meant no harm, if we did say it in joke,' pouted one of the attendants.

'Like me!-you must come and see us. I have something to say to you. . . . . You must!'

Philammon misinterpreted the intense interest of her tone, and if he did not shrink back, gave some involuntary gesture of reluctance. Pelagia laughed aloud.

It

may

'Don't be vain enough to suspect, foolish boy, but come! Do you think that I have nothing to talk about but nonsense? Come and see me. be better for you. I live in and she named a fashionable street, which Philammon, though he inwardly vowed not to accept the invitation, somehow could not help remembering.

'Do leave the wild man and come,' growled the Amal from within the palanquin. You are not going to turn nun, I hope ?'

Not while the first man I ever met in the world stays in it,' answered Pelagia, as she skipped into the palanquin, taking care to show the most lovely white heel and ancle, and like the Parthian, send a random

arrow as she retreated. But the dart was lost on Philammon, she had been already hustled away the bevy of laughing attendan amid baskets, dressing cases, bird-cages, and was fain to make is escape into the Babel round, c/ inquire his way to the Patriarch house.

'Patriarch's house ?' answered th man whom he first addressed, alt lean, swarthy fellow, with per black eyes, who, with a base d fruit at his feet, was sunning hast on a baulk of timber, meditative chewing papyrus-cane, and exam ing the strangers with a look absurd sagacity. I know it; w out a doubt I know it; all Ala andria has good reason to know : Are you a monk ?' 'Yes.'

"Then ask your way of the marke you wont go far without finding one.'

'But I do not even know the r direction: what is your gro against monks, my good man?"

Look here, my youth; you too ingenuous for a monk. Don't flatter yourself that it will last. you can wear the sheep-skin, haunt the churches here for a mont without learning to lie, and slander, and clap, and hoot, and perhaps play your part in a sedition-and-murder satyric drama-why, you are! better man than I take you for. I sir, am a Greek, and a philosopher though the whirlpool of matter my have, and indeed has, involved my ethereal spark in the body of aporter. Therefore, youth,' continued the little man, starting up upon his bank like an excited monkey, and stretch ing out one oratoric paw, I bears treble hatred to the monkish tribe. First, as a man and a husband; ... foras for the smiles of beauty, orother wise, such as I have I have; and the monks, if they had their wicked will, would leave neither men nor women in the world. Sir, they would exterminate the human race in a single generation, by a voluntary suicide! Secondly, as a porter; for if all men turned monks, nobody would be idle, and the profession of portering would be annihilated. Thirdly, sir, as a philosopher; for as the false coin is odious to the true, so is the irrational and animal

sceticism of the monk, to the logical nd methodic self-restraint of one ho, like your humblest of philosohers, aspires to a life according to he pure reason.'

And pray,' asked Philammon, alf-laughing, who has been your utor in philosophy?'

6

The fountain of classic wisdom, Hypatia herself. As the ancient age-the name is unimportant to a nonk-pumped water nightly that ne might study by day, so I, the guardian of cloaks and parasols at the sacred doors of her lecture-room, imbibe celestial knowledge. From my youth I felt in me a soul above the matter - entangled herd. She

revealed to me the glorious fact, that I am a spark of Divinity itself. A fallen star, I am, sir!' continued he, pensively, stroking his lean stomach —a fallen star!-fallen, if the dignity of philosophy will allow of the simile, among the hogs of the lower world-indeed, into the hog-bucket itself. Well, after all, I will show you the way to the Archbishop's. There is a philosophic pleasure in opening one's treasures to the modest young. Perhaps you will assist me by carrying this basket of fruit?' And the little man jumped up, put his basket on Philammon's head, and trotted off up a neighbouring

street.

Philammon followed, half contemptuous, half wondering at what this philosophy might be, which could feed the self-conceit of anything so abject as his ragged little apish guide; but the novel roar and whirl of the street, the perpetual stream of busy faces, the line of curricles, palanquins, laden asses, camels, elephants, which met and passed him, and squeezed him up steps and into doorways, as they threaded their way through the great Moon-gate into the ample street beyond, drove everything from his mind but wondering curiosity, and a vague, helpless dread of that great living wilderness, more terrible than any dead wilderness of sand which he had left behind. Already he longed for the repose, the silence of the Laura-for faces which knew him and smiled upon him; but it was too late to turn back now.

His guide held on for more than

a mile up the great main street, crossed in the centre of the city, at right angles, by one equally magnificent, at each end of which, miles away, appeared, dim and distant over the heads of the living stream of passengers, the yellow sand-hills of the desert; while at the end of the vista in front of them gleamed the blue harbour, through a network of countless masts.

At last they reached the quay at the opposite end of the street; and there burst on Philammon's astonished eyes a vast semicircle of blue sea, ringed with palaces and towers. He stopped involuntarily; and his little guide stopped also, and looked askance at the young monk, to watch the effect which that grand panorama should produce on him.

"There!

-Behold our works! Us Greeks! us benighted heathens! Look at it, and feel yourself what you are, a very small, conceited, ignorant young person, who fancies that your new religion gives you a right to despise every one else. Did Christians make all this? Did Christians build that pharos there on the left horn-wonder of the world? Did Christians raise that mile-long mole which runs towards the land, with its two drawbridges, connecting the two ports? Did Christians build this esplanade, or this gate of the sun above our heads? Or that Cæsareum on our right here? Look at those obelisks before it!' And he pointed upwards to those two world-famous ones, one of which still lies on its ancient site, as Cleopatra's needle. Look up! look up, I say, and feel small-very small indeed! Did Christians raise them, or engrave them from base to point, with the wisdom of the ancients? Did Christians build that Museum next to it, or design its statues and its frescoes-now, alas! re-echoing no more to the hummings of the Attic bee? Did they pile up out of the waves that palace beyond it, or that Exchange, or fill that Temple of Neptune with breathing brass and blushing marble? Did they build that Timonium on the point where Antony, worsted at Actium, forgot his shame in Cleopatra's arms? Did they quarry out that island of Antirrhodus into a

nest of docks, or cover those waters with the sails of every nation under heaven? Speak! Thou son of bats and moles-thou six feet of sandthou mummy out of the cliff caverns! Can monks do works like these?'

'Other men have laboured, and we have entered into their labours,' answered Philammon, trying to seem as unconcerned as he could. He was, indeed, too utterly astonished to be angry at anything. The overwhelming vastness, multiplicity, and magnificence of the whole scene; the range of buildings, such as mother earth never, perhaps, carried on her lap before or since; the extraordinary variety of form-the pure Doric and Ionic of the earlier Ptolemies, the barbaric and confused gorgeousness of the later Roman, and here and there an imitation of the grand elephantine style of old Egypt, its gaudy colours relieving, while they deepened, the effect of its massive and simple outlines; the eternal repose of that great belt of stone contrasting with the restless ripple of the glittering harbour, and the busy sails which crowded out into the sea beyond, like white doves taking their flight into boundless space; all dazzled, overpowered, saddened him. This was the world. . . Was it not beautiful? Must not the men who made all this have been-if not great . . . . yet.. he knew not what? Surely they had great souls and noble thoughts in them! Surely there was something godlike in being able to create such things! Not for themselves alone, too; but for a nation-for generations yet unborn. . . . And there was the sea. . . . and beyond it, nations of men innumerable. His imagination was dizzy with thinking of them. Were they all doomed-lost? Had God no love for them?

....

At last, recovering himself, he recollected his errand, and again asked his way to the Archbishop's house.

This way, O youthful nonentity!' answered the little man, leading the way round the great front of the Cæsareum, at the foot of the obelisks.

Philammon's eye fell on some new masonry in the pediment, ornamented with Christian symbols.

How? Is this a church ?'

'It is the Cæsareum. It he come temporarily a church immortal gods have, for the being, condescended to war? rights; but it is the Cas nevertheless. This way; dow street to the right. There, pointing to a doorway in the the Museum,' is the last bar the Muses-the lecture-roca Hypatia, the school of my thiness. . . . . And here,' se... at the door of a splendid hos the opposite side of the street. the residence of that blest far of Athene-Neith, as the barbe of Egypt would denominate : goddess-we men of Macedonia tain the time-honoured Gr nomenclature. . . . . You may down your basket.' And he kis at the door, and delivering the to a black porter, made a 2obeisance to Philammon, and se on the point of taking his depar But where is the Archos house ?'

Close to the Serapeium. cannot miss the place: four h columns of marble, now ruined Christian persecutors, stand : eminence

'But how far off?'

About three miles; nesr gate of the Moon.'

Why, was not that the gate which we entered the city on 1 other side ?'

'Exactly so. You will know y way back, having already traves it.'

Philammon checked a decide carnal inclination to seize the fellow by the throat, and knock h head against the wall, and contexte himself by saying

Then do you actually mean say, you heathen villain, that you have taken me six or seven out of my road ?'

Good words, young man. If y do me harm, I call for help; we arr close to the Jews' quarter, and there are some thousands there who wil swarm out like wasps on the chan of beating a monk to death. Yet that which I have done, I have done with good purpose. First, pe litically, or according to practical wisdom-in order that you, not I, might carry the basket. Next, philosophically, or according to the in

ons of the pure reason-in order you might, by beholding the nificence of that great civilizawhich your fellows wish to dey, learn that you are an ass, and rtoise, and a nonentity; and so olding yourself to be nothing, be moved to become something.' nd he moved off.

hilammon seized him by the ar of his ragged tunic, and held in a grip from which the little 1, though he twisted like an eel, ld not escape.

Peaceably, if you will. If not, main force. You shall go back h me, and show me every step of way. It is a just penalty.'

The philosopher conquers cirnstances by submitting to them. go peaceably. Indeed the base cessities of the hog-bucket side of Fistence compel me of themselves ck to the Moon-gate, for another rly fruit job.'

So they went back together. Now why Philammon's thoughts hould have been running on the Pext new specimen of womankind to hom he had been introduced, though nly in name, let psychologists tell, - ut certainly, after he had walked rome half-mile in silence, he suddenly woke up, as out of many mediations, and asked

But who is this Hypatia of whom trou talk so much?'

Who is Hypatia, rustic? The Queen of Alexandria! In wit, Athene; Hera in majesty; in beauty, Aphrodite!'

And who are they?' asked Philammon.

The porter stopped; surveyed him slowly from foot to head with an expression of boundless pity and contempt, and was in the act of walking off in the ecstasy of his disdain, when he was brought to suddenly by Philammon's strong arm.

Ah!-I recollect. There is a compact.... Who is Athene? The goddess, giver of wisdom. Hera, spouse of Zeus, Queen of the Celestials. Aphrodite, mother of love. .. You are not expected to understand.'

Philammon did understand, however, so much as this, that Hypatia was a very unique and wonderful person in the mind of his little guide; and therefore asked the only further

VOL. XLV. NO. CCLXVII.

Of the human race in general, my young friend. The philosopher must rise above the individual, to the contemplation of the universal Aha! Here is something worth seeing, and the gates are open. And he stopped at the portal of a vast building.

6

-

Is this the patriarch's house?' The Patriarch's tastes are more plebeian. He lives, they say, in two dirty little rooms-knowing what is fit for him. The Patriarch's house? Its antipodes, my young friend-that is, if such beings have a cosmic existence, on which point Hypatia has her doubts. This is the temple of art and beauty; the Delphic tripod of poetic inspiration; the solace of the earth-worn drudge; in a word, the theatre; which your patriarch, if he could, would convert tomorrow into abut the philosopher must not revile. Ah! I see the prefect's apparitors at the gate. He is making the polity, as we call it here; the dispositions; settling, in short, the bill of fare for the day, in compliance with the public palate. A facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week-admired by some, the Jews especially. To the more classic taste, many of his movements-his recoil, especially-are wanting in the true antique severity

might be called perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the weary pilgrim must be amused. step in and hear.'

Let us

But before Philammon could refuse, an uproar arose within, a rush outward of the mob, and inward of the prefect's apparitors.

It is false!' shouted many voices. A Jewish calumny! The man is innocent!'

There's no more sedition in him

X