1849.] ALEXANDER'S EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION. appear to have been particularly attentive in For this reason, it is impossible to institute The future editors of Arrian and Quintus selves against the charge of pedantry, by In the oases, the ignorance of modern times, accompanied by more than corresponding idleness, has effected a still more deplorable metamorphosis. The ancients knew no other way of expressing the extreme beauty and fertility of these spots, than by comparing them to the Amenti of the Egyp 1 tians, those happy and fortunate islands, | supply of white, yellow, and blue dates. blessed with everlasting sunshine, in which There was tasted in perfection the fruit of the souls of the virtuous, when emancipated the lotus tree-not that symbolical lotus from their tabernacles of clay, enjoy eternal which maddened the senses in the Nilotic felicity. The oldest of the epic poets of valley-but the real fruit of the earth, in Greece speaks in the following terms of these taste like a mangustene, and in color like fabulous isles: gold painted with streaks of red. Side by by side with these grew also the banana's most luscious fruit, and the cooling watermelon, and the refreshing pomegranate with its crimson seeds, with a thousand smaller luxuries, not the least of which are fragrant flowers, the most ethereal of all earth's children. "Stern winter smiles on that auspicious clime, The Boeotian bard, also, who possessed an imagination of singular vigor and fertility, speaks of these happy abodes with equal enthusiasm: "But in the happy fields of light, Where Phoebus with an equal ray, And gilds the cloudless day, To vex th' ungrateful soil, To tempt the dangers of the billowy main, The recompense of justice they receive, Without a tear, eternal ages live; When Mr. Bayle St. John stood on the summit of the Mount of Tombs, after having visited the ruins of Ammon's Temple, and cooled his lips at the Fountain of the Sun, he discovered on all sides enough to justify the most glowing descriptions of antiquity. In the story of the phantom camel, the gardens of Irem are compared to an emerald set in a golden ring. The Oasis of Siwah or Jupiter Ammon might easily be made to rival the paradise of Sultan Shedad. Gardens more luxuriant than those of Ro setta, large palm groves, thickets of banana, pomegranate, olives, and fig-trees; fields of bright green Egyptian clover, intersected in all directions by pebbly streams and fringed brooks, and encompassed by the desert, and While, banished by the Fates from joy and ranges of salt lakes with margins as white as rest, Intolerable woes the impious soul infest. But they who, in true virtue strong, The third purgation can endure, And keep their minds from fraudful wrong They through the starry paths of Jove Sweet children of the main, Purge the blest island from corroding cares, And flowers of golden hue that blow adorn.' All the other poets, and some prose writers of antiquity, whose subject would permit them to digress to the paxagwv vnooi, delighted to indulge their fancies with pictures of these verdant paradises. There rose the fane of Ammon-there welled forth in sparkling brilliancy the Fountain of the Sun-there the palm groves yielded an inexhaustible others. snow; these are some of the features which impart beauty to the Oasis. But there are The desert itself is replete with savage beauty. Rolling its wild waves towards this small valley, as if to engulph it in torrents of sand, the power of nature stops at a given spot, while the salt lakes interpose between the ever-restless ocean and the sweet, green isle which it encompasses. The spaces covered with dazzling salt are compared by our traveller himself to glaciers just beginning to melt; and when he descends from his lofty point of view, and comes to speak of the beauties of the country in detail, he dilates with much pleasure on the many agreeable walks he took during his stay. There is generally a garden wall or a fence on either hand of the lanes, with pomegranate trees bursting over it in redundant luxuriance, and hanging their rich, tempting, purple fruit within reach of the hand, or the deep green fig-tree, or the apricot, or the huge ragged leaf of the banana, or the olive, or the vine. The spaces between them are not left idle, being carpeted with a copious growth of bursim and lucerne, that loads the air with its fragrance, and is often chequered with spots of a green light that steals in through the branchy canopy above. Sometimes a tiny brook shoots its fleet waters along by the wayside, or lapses slowly with eddying surface, nestling gently between grassy banks, or babbling over a pebbly bed. Here and there a wide bridge of palm-trunks is thrown across, but the glassy current frequently glides at will athwart the road. At one place there is a meadow, at another a copse; but on all sides the date-trees fling up their columnar forms, and wave aloft their leafy capitals. Occasionally a huge blue crane sails by on flagging wing to alight on the margin of some neighboring pool; the hawk or the falcon soars or wheels far up in the air; the dove sinks fluttering on the bough; the quail starts up with its short, strong, whirring flight; and sparrows, with numerous other small predatory birds, go sweeping across the fields. Sometimes you may observe the hard-working black turning up huge clods with his mattock; asses are driven past, laden with dried "aghoul;" files of camels move along in the distance on the borders of the desert. From some points the castellated capital is descried down a long vista; or the village of Gharmy rises aloft on its inaccessible rock; or the majestic fragment of the sanctuary of Ammon, which has so bravely stood the brunt of ages, may be seen still standing erect in the midst of its silent glade. The reader of imagination will easily be able to represent the Macedonian conqueror and his followers proceeding between these garden walls, beneath the shade of pomegranates, fig-trees, and bananas, to learn the response of the oracle. In those days the Ammonians were not unaccustomed to magnificence. Princes and ambassadors from all parts of the pagan world, thronged thither to consult the Jupiter of the Nile; and, therefore, when Alexander, with the hereditary pomp of his nation, and more than its hereditary pride, proceeded towards Ombeydah, he displayed, perhaps, scarcely a shade of grandeur beyond what the natives of the Oasis had witnessed before. When he arrived at the temple, and entered within the Temenos, or sacred inclosure, the chief priest, advancing, addressed him in the name of Ammon, as the son of that god; to which Alexander replied, that he accepted the title and acknowledged it. The first question he put-for, in regard to his being the son of Ammon, the priests had anticipated his wishes-was, whether he should be able to achieve the conquest of the whole earth? To which the ready reply was, that his father had destined him to become universal lord of mankind. Then, forgetting his divine parentage, and obeying the natural impulse of the affections, he demanded whether all the persons concerned in his father's murder had been punished? To this the priest replied, that it was not in the power of mortal man to injure his father, but that the individuals engaged in the assassination of Philip had already paid the penalty of their crime. He then went on to say that Alexander should prove invincible till raised in due time to his place among the gods. His followers then came forward and put no other question than this, whether it were lawful for them to pay divine honor to their victorious king? To which the priest, with ready flattery, replied that Ammon willingly consented they should adore his son. The history of this transaction shows that, although mankind still consulted oracles, they put but very little faith in them; for it could not but be evident to all observing men present, that the whole affair was a theatrical exhibition got up to impose upon the vulgar. In the earlier ages it was different; oracles were not then organized impostures, though they were, of course, always based on the unfounded supposition that heaven, when consulted in a particular manner, deigned to give audible responses to the inquiries of man. Whoever is acquainted with the natives of the East, must be aware how prone they still are to superstition, and how easy it is to excite their enthusiasm and impose upon their credulity. They believe, and never affect to deny, that the world is filled with several orders of spirits, whose business or whose pleasure it is to hold intercourse with man, to guide his present actions, and to reveal to him the color of the future. If there be less of this feeling in the West, you must not thence conclude that it is, or ever can be, extinct. Indeed, travellers even from England often exhibit in the valley of the Nile a stretch of credulity, which would do no discredit to the most illiterate Arab. If, then, we carry our minds back to the infancy of civilization, when the whole philosophy of nature was a still greater mystery than it is now, it would not be difficult to conceive how men could persuade themselves into the belief that they were holding intercourse with heaven. Even at the present day the wanderer from Europe feels, as he breathes the air of the desert, that it is pervaded by the influence of superstition. He listens at night with a sort of while he was every day losing more and more his command over himself. breathless eagerness, as if he expected the voice of nature to become audible, because there are influences at work around him which induce him to personify her, to clothe her with intellectual attributes, and to imagine that she sympathizes visibly with man. Still, from the tenor of Alexander's questions, and the replies made to them, it is impossible to doubt that the whole was a political stratagem, put in play by the conqueror, in conjunction with the priests of the Nile, for the purpose of operating on public opinion. The vulgar easily seize upon rumor, and convert it into truth. Accepting it with doubt and misgiving at first, they soon familiarized it to their minds, and found themselves interested in maintaining what they received without examination. The saying of the oracle was soon spread through all lands; and it cannot be doubted that it reached the valley of the Nile before the re-visions, and incessantly threatened with turn of the son of Ammon himself. He was destined to become the king of the whole earth. Ammon had declared so much; and, therefore, though the king of Persia might still choose to fight for his crown, the idea insinuated itself into his army, and unbraced the sinews of those most devoted to his service. It was a precisely similar idea that sat on the edge of Mohammed's sword, and gave him perpetual victory. He was the prophet, commissioned to instruct the nations, and, at the same time, to subdue them. It was therefore, in some respects, impious to contend against him. Alexander, though a man of genius, and an astute statesman, was still too little the master of his own passions to keep up the imposture. Constantly allured and subdued by pleasure, by wine, feasting, and the blandishments of women, he often forgot the thought of empire, and descended to the level of his meanest courtier; gradually yielding more and more to the suggestions of his senses, a poison put a period to his life, and sent him still victorious to the stars. Literally, therefore, was the declaration of the Oracle fulfilled. He met with no serious reverses during his whole life, as he went on adding kingdom after kingdom to his empire, It was in the footsteps of this man, Mr. Bayle St. John went to and returned from the Oasis of Siwah, which few Europeans have visited since the Oracle ceased to utter responses. It is now inhabited by a fierce race of Berbers, imbued with all the prejudices of El-Islam, but still capable of being subdued by long-continued acts of forbearance and courtesy. During the stay of Mr. St. John and his companions, however, they displayed the most inhospitable disposition; though, towards the end, they exhibited some tokens of a desire to make amends for their ill-behavior. A few weeks more would probably have opened for the travellers the way into the City of Salt; but they were weary of ill-usage, of being shot at in their tents at night, of being refused pro We starvation. We cannot wonder, therefore, that when, at the eleventh hour, the Sheikh of the Oasis entreated them to prolong their stay, and even to return when they had actually started, they should have persisted in quitting so disagreeable a race, with whose caprice and insolence nothing but the moderation and curiosity of travellers could have induced them to put up so long. The reader, we think, will derive much pleasure and instruction from Mr. Bayle St. John's volume, which describes a portion of the desert which has very rarely been visited. ourselves have beheld it far southward, within the tropics, where the atmosphere is never moistened by a single shower, where no cloud is ever visible, and where the sun rises and sets in unmitigated splendor from one year's end to another. This grand monotony is not beheld in Marmarica. There the travellers sometimes walk beneath a canopy of rosy clouds, which cover the whole arch of the horizon for a few minutes before the sun goes down. This also is beautiful, though we prefer the imperturbable serenity which broods over the interior wastes, and renders them so delicious to the imaginative traveller. From Sharpe's Magazine. LITERARY IMPOSTURES OF LAUDER AND BOWER. MR. ISAAC D'ISRAELI, in his " Curiosities, to collect them, and in 1750 he republished of Literature," has remarked that some of the most sinister literary forgeries in modern times have been perpetrated by Scotchmen, and he instances Lauder and Bower-two of the blackest sheep of the world of letters. The disgraceful fraud of which the former stands convicted, so unparalleled for its meanness, baseness, and dishonesty, has justly condemned him to eternal infamy, and rendered his name a by-word of contempt. To the credit of English literature, it did not indeed long remain undiscovered, and it may at least be said to have had one beneficial effect-that of placing the unwary on their guard against an unscrupulous disputant, and of demonstrating the importance and necessity of occasionally verifying a quotation, and testing a doubtful assertion. William Lauder was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he acquired the reputation of considerable scholarship. It is not improbable, however, that his unamiable disposition displayed itself in some shape during his academical career, for at its close he was unsuccessful in all his efforts to obtain preferment in the University. He was first a candidate for the professorship of Latin, and afterwards for the office of librarian. Having been in both instances rejected, he tried for one of the masterships of the High School, and was also unsuccessful. In 1739, he published an edition of Johnson's Latin translation of the Psalms, with other passages of sacred poetry; but, however creditably he might have executed his task, the speculation was not a profitable one. Soured by disappointments, he came to London, where we find him engaged, at the time he became notorious, as a teacher of the classics. In 1747 he commenced his attack on the reputation of Milton, in various communications to the "Gentleman's Magazine," in which the great poet was denounced as an unprincipled plagiarist. These papers having led to some controversy, and excited some attention, Lauder was induced them in a volume, entitled, "An Essay on Milton's use and abuse of the moderns in his Paradise Lost;" with the motto, taken from Milton "Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." The work is preceded by a characteristic advertisement from Lauder, which states that "Gentlemen who are desirous of securing their children from ill example, or are themselves inclined to gain or retrieve the knowledge of the Latin tongue, may be waited on at their own houses by the author of the following Essay;" an announcement certainly calculated to convey the idea that the canny Scot" regarded his erudite performance as an excellent mercantile speculation, and favorable medium of publicity. To render the work more remarkable, the preface and postscript were contributed by Dr. 66 Samuel Johnson. The latter contained a charitable appeal on behalf of Milton's granddaughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, who was then living and in great distress, as will appear from the following quotation from the Rev. Dr. Newton's Life of Milton, with Johnson's eloquent remarks— "Such is the caprice of fortune, this granddaughter of a man who will be an everlasting glory to the nation, has now for some years, with her husband, kept a little chandler's or grocer's shop for their subsistence, lately at the Lower Holloway, in the road between Highgate and London, and at present in Cock Lane, not far from Shoreditch church.' "That this relation is true cannot be questioned; but surely the honor of letters, the dignity of sacred poetry, the spirit of the English nation, and the glory of human nature, require that it should be true no longer. In an age in which statues are erected to the honor of this great writer, in which his effigy has been distributed on medals, and his work propagated by translations and illustrated with commentaries; in an age which, amidst all its vices and all its follies, has not become infamous for want of charity, it may be surely allowed to hope that |