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various countries of the earth. But he has no need of arms; he conquers all nations by the power of eloquence, and by the charms of magie. During his absence, Typhon, his brother, an envious and malicious character, makes several attempts, in which he is frustrated by the vigilance of Isis, to possess himself of the throne. At length Osiris returns. Typhon has conspired against his life with Aso, the queen of Ethiopia, and with seventy-two companions. He invites Osiris to a feast, under the pretence of friendship. When the wine was going round, Typhon caused a splendid and curiously wrought chest to be brought; he promised to present it to any one who would lie down in it, if he found it to agree with his dimensions; they all try, but are all disappointed. Last of all, Osiris tries; it fits admirably; by a coup de main, Typhon and his friends shut the chest up, throw it into the river, and let it drive down towards the sea. Isis is informed of the cruel fate of her husband; with loud lamentations she wanders through the country to seek for the dead body; at length she learns that it had been driven down one of the mouths of the Nile towards Byblus. She follows it, but it was too late; the chest had been stopped in its progress by the rushes on the shore near Byblus; the power of life that was still inherent in the dead body of the king, made the plants shoot up into a beautiful tree. Malcandrus, the king of Phoenicia, caused it to be felled, and used as a column in the building of his palace; there, then, the sacred remains were concealed; and there Isis appears in mourning, and in humble attire. The queen invites the mysterious stranger, and makes her the nurse of her child. Isis, in return for the kindness shown to her, undertakes to purify the infant from all the evils that flesh is heir to; accordingly she puts him at once into the fire; the mother is alarmed at the strange proceeding, and signifies her astonishment. Isis appears as the goddess, with thunder and lightning; she touches the column, it splits, and she retires with the coffin that encloses the remains of Osiris. They are buried; but Typhon, so ancient is the odious system of the resurrection men, does not respect the mansion of the dead; he dissects the body most cruelly into fourteen pieces, which are scattered in the river. But Isis collects them, and the body is again consigned to the grave at Philae. Besides, graves are erected on every spot where some relics had been found; and fourteen places boast of this honor, that the remains of Osiris are entombed in their temples. But Osiris does not die unrevenged, nor is the offender to triumph for ever. Horus, the son of Osiris, collects the friends of his father; Osiris has appeared to him in his dreams, to inspire him with thoughts of revenge. Typhon is made captive. Isis, mild and forbearing as she is, releases the captive enemy from his chains. But kindness is lost on him-he recommences hostilities; but is finally overcome, and exiled into the desert. Horus is the last of the gods who governed in Egypt; after him, a mortal dynasty follows.

This shapeless tale, of which we have only given a general outline, has puzzled the ancients a good deal. Plutarch enumerates four different keys, besides the one proposed by himself. Some, he

says, maintained that the story of Osiris and Typhon was an embel. lished tradition concerning the fates of the early kings of Egypt; others believe that the doctrine of evil dæmons and of the goodgenii is expressed in it; others, that moral ideas are intended to be conveyed by it; others again, that it contains astronomical facts. Plutarch himself (de Is. et Osir. c. 48) conceives, that the contest between the good and evil principle in the natural and the moral world is illustrated by that fiction. Chæremon, a stoic philosopher, gave a full development of facts belonging to natural philosophy, which he thought to have discovered under the veil of that fabulous recital. Jamblichus, and other Neo Platonists, built upon it an ingenious and fanciful system of metaphysics.

Creuzer sets out by acknowledging that different keys are not only admissible, but necessary. In the first place it contains an allusion to the peculiar nature of the climate of Egypt. Osiris is the Nile; his death is celebrated twice every year, for there is a double harvest in Egypt every year; and after the seed is sown, from March to July, and again from September to the beginning of November, the country is laboring under the insufferable heat: it is governed by Typhon, the lord of the desert, from whence the noxious and burning winds blow; there is Isis in mourning, the land of Egypt, the bride of the Nile; Osiris is killed by Typhon, and his seventy-two companions-the seventy-two evil days during which the hot wind blows, and the process of vegetation is apparently suspended.

Creuzer also points out the policy of the priests who invented this fiction, in availing themselves of the existing popular superstitions, and combining them to a system of symbolical emblems. The former inhabitants had entertained different notions, instead of which one system was now established throughout the country; they had worshipped different animals; these were all combined in the idea of one body, the representative of animal life; to the hovering of the soul round the dead body, was substituted the doctrine of the transmigration; and the soul of the universe, the soul of Osiris of old, was taught to be still embodied in the successive generations of the Apis, the sacred bull. It could not be expected that the different tribes should at once resign their former mode of worship; different animals were still kept sacred at different places. But though this sort of worship was tolerated, yet the sacred animal, that was revered by the whole nation as the living representation of the Deity, was that same sacred bull. Nor had that animal been selected without meaning. It contributed materially in giving a religious sanction to agricultural pursuits.

But besides this local signification of the story of Iris and Osiris, it contains a number of facts belonging to a science, in which the Egyptian priests were well known to have attained considerable proficiency. The astronomical signification of many of the incidents, has never been questioned. Some of them are so evidently devised for that purpose, that they leave no room for doubt; for instance, when Hermes is said to have played at dice with the moon, and

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gained the seventieth part of every day. Now, the seventieth part of every day throughout a twelvemonth, gives five additional days, which were inserted in order to correct the former year of the Egyptians, which consisted of 360 days only. Creuzer has analysed a number of such incidents, and, in our opinion, in a very satisfactory manner. He confesses himself under considerable obligations to the learned Frenchmen, and especially Jomard, who accompanied Bonaparte in his famous expedition to Egypt, and who employed that opportunity with a zeal and success which will always do great credit to them, and to the discernment of the extraordinary individual who selected them for the purpose. The accurate drawings and reports of Egyptian monuments, which are published in that admirable work "Description "de l'Egypte," reflect much light on the Egyptian system, when compared with the accounts given by the classical authors. It appears from them, that the vicissitudes of Iris and Osiris and their family, were made the vehicle for a complete astronomical calendar of the Egyptian year. The names of the deities were frequently changed according to the different predicaments applied to them in the course of these illustrations: thus the sun in the vernal sign of Aries is described by the name of Amun, (Ammon); in the sign of Taurus, he appears as Osiris; in the summer solstice, as Horus, when he has regained his former power, and "is himself again"---or rather, when he is revived in the image of his youthful son. It is interesting to follow the parallels which Creuzer has traced between the fictions of Egypt and of other countries, on the subject of these astronomical observations. Hercules, under the name of Sem or Som, appears as another personification of the sun, struggling with all his might for the supremacy. In the winter Solstice he appears as the weak and sickly Harpocrates, a mere shadow of his former self. Isis, in many instances, is the personification of the moon. But in a more general sense, she is the Goddess of Nature; she has been identified with Demeter or Ceres, and, which is still more strange, with the goddess Hertha, (Erde, the earth), worshipped by the ancient Germans. Tacitus says of the Suevi, or inhabitants of Swabia, "Isidi sacrificant." Now it is a fact, that Egyptian antiquities, that is to say, images decidedly resembling the sacred monuments of Egypt, are frequently found in Germany, and more especially in the south. It appears, however, to us, that great caution ought to be observed in deciding on their origin. We are enabled to quote one fact, which has happened to come under our personal knowledge, and which is not mentioned in Creuzer. Some four or five years ago, when travelling in the south of Germany, we were invited by a friend to go a few miles out of our way, to visit some curious antiquities. It was a glorious day, and we were straggling not far from the river Neccar, at the foot of the Wirtemberg Alps, which exhibit a very picturesque scenery. We arrived at a village, whose name must be either Bellzen, or Bälsen, or Belseim, or some such melodious sound, situated, we believe, about twelve miles north from Tubingen. The front of the small village church presented some most curious specimens of engravings, or rather hautreliefs in stone, which every one must have recognized at first sight as

Egyptian. Among them were some dwarfs of the same shape, and a very uncouth shape it is, and with the identical attributes described by Herodotus as belonging to the Cabiri, and still found on the Egyptian monuments. Besides, there were rams' heads; of course, intended for Ammon; and a glorious disk of the sun, and several other emblems, which we now forget. There was also a cross carved in one of the stones above the portal, which in our archæological zeal we had nearly mistaken for the Egyptian cross, the key of the flood-gates of the Nile, which Osiris frequently bears. But we were reminded by our German friend, that the shape of Osiris's key is essentially different from the cross then before us. However, we were not a little puzzled by so strange and barbarous an exhibition in a Christian land, and a Christian church too. We wonder that Mr. Haldane and the Rev. Mr. Rose have not picked up the fact; it would have afforded a most uncontrovertible proof, at least one a good deal more convictive than theirs, that they are all heathens, and worse than heathens, in Germany. Besides, the name of the place was evidently derived from Baal, or Bel; and having blundered about the Hebrew,

"In our hot youth, when George the Third was King,"

we had a faint reminiscence that there is some such word in the Hebrew, which means the Lord, which was said to be of Phoenician origin, and why should it not be Coptic or Egyptian as well? We were full of these ideas, and plumed ourselves not a little on our discoveries; indeed we were then thinking of laying them before the world in a small quarto, with a frontispiece "by an artist of eminence." But when the next day we reached Stutgard, our learned and excellent friend, Prof. Gustav Schwab, who was just preparing a Guide to the Swabian Alps, with particular reference to antiquities, informed us, that there was little need of puzzling ourselves or the world any further about the said dwarfs; that he had found a passage in one of the Scriptores Historiæ Aug. stating, that a certain Roman legion, we forget the number, had been stationed for a considerable time in Egypt, and, a case by no means uncommon, had completely adopted the Egyptian worship, and that the same legion was afterwards sent into the south of Germany, and quartered somewhere near the Neccar. It was probable they had constructed a temple there to their Egyptian deities; and that the first Christian missionaries, as they frequently did, consecrated it as a church, adding a Christian cross by way of security against the infecting presence of the uncouth idols. Now, if all the cases of Egyptian antiquities in other countries were thus analyzed, we have no doubt that many at least might be traced to a similar origin.

But we have been led astray by our recollections of our mythological excursions in Germany. We have only room to add, that Creuzer's Essay on Egypt (in the first volume of his work, p. 240-532 of the edition of 1819) proceeds to examine, with constant reference to the monuments still extant, the mythological details, and to prove that the system of the priests was a complete encyclopædia of human knowledge; that their studies were divided between the observation

of nature, and metaphysical speculation; that in both they were more advanced than is generally supposed. But in a discussion of that kind, if it has succeeded in removing some difficulties, others still continne to court investigation; if much has been satisfactorily accounted for, much still remains unexplained; if Creuzer has successfully led the way, to "Aling from the full sheaves the liberal handful," a rich harvest in the land of harvests still remains in store for others; and we know, that it is his wish, that others may read the challenge on the portals of the temple at Sais---“ I am all that is past, all that is present, all that is to come; MY VEIL NO MORTAL HATH EVER REMOVED."

STANZAS.

And do you seek once more your native shade,
And pale Repentance lure you back to rove?
Has vain Ambition then your steps betray'd,
That foe alike to Friendship and to Love?
Say, with a heart to first fond feelings true,
You dwelt unhappy 'midst the glitt'ring crowd;
That Fortune wove her lures in vain for you,

She could not link you with the senseless proud.
Say, that you sigh'd 'midst Splendour's gayest hour,-
Thought with affection on each village friend,

And in our vallies wish'd to twine that flower
You once were wont with your dark locks to blend.
Say this, and Friendship shall not ask you more,
In those sad looks your errors are confess'd,
Thy fault was venial,---o'er it only pore,

That where you have been---you may still be bless'd.

Let me divest you of these diamonds rare,--
Unbind the gay tiara from your brow,--
For ill indeed it suits those looks of care
Such costly gems to lavishly bestow.

E'en whilst we converse o'er yon forest tree

What changes have in quick succession past;
First ting'd with gold its leaves appear'd to be,
Then shade fell o'er it---yet 'tis bright at last.
Without that shade between those gleams of sun
It had not been so beautiful---and life
To you perchance a smoother course may run
Since one sad year has been to sorrow rife.

C. B.

VIEWS IN THE WEST INDIES.

Engraved from Drawings taken recently in the Islands.-Underwood, Fleet Street.

It has been the custom of the Anti-Slavery Society to circulate through the country little maps of the world, in which the British

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