have passed away? Time develops his memory well; he towers up grandly in the distance; the impression which he made upon our youth was no illusion, for his stature seems as large to the man as it did to the boy; but he is now better understood, and grows more genial with age, as some buildings wear a softer outline when seen in the distant perspective. The thoughtless and idle disliked him, undoubtedly; yet I have noticed that when they became responsible for boys they often hastened to place them under his care. Like the loadstone, with an affinity for steel and iron, his character recognized intuitively all that was good in other men. I never saw in any mind such a sympathy with the right intentions of others, whether this intention was struggling against obtuseness, early disadvantages, or the pressure of poverty. Naturally a ruler, he had a strong moral sense of the necessity of training the young to obedient habits. In his eye, subordination was the first virtue of the pupil; he was the stern foe of the proud and unyielding, and sometimes probably denied them real justice. To the contrite, however, his heart warmed, and to save the penitent he did at times risk the authority of the school. I thought that a few took advantage of this kindness, and persuaded him to retain them in their places when his real judgment was to dismiss them at once. With a strong natural sense of the worth and mission of the scholar, he longed to raise all his pupils into this exalted class of men; yet his sense of duty controlled his passion, and he aimed at the development of manhood, rather than the accumulation of learning in the pupil's mind. Most of the complaints against him have originated from the unworthy. In the main, the public has decided in his favor; and it is unjust to weigh a few instances of conduct which seemed to be arbitrary, against thirty years of constant and increasing success. To expect perfection is always unwise; some teachers may have avoided his faults, but few have surpassed his merits; and we may be obliged to wait long before another such instructor is raised up for the youth of our land."

Since the preceding was in type another of Dr. Taylor's pupils, a Professor in a New England College, has written: "The strictness of Dr. Taylor's discipline to a well-disposed student was no more disagreeable than a bracing northwest wind to sound lungs and a good constitution. We knew that we must study under him, and we were glad to be made to form good habits of study. Many, like myself, had such experience of his kindness in poverty or sickness that we came to understand what a warm heart there always was beneath his usual and natural reserve of manner. We had our eyes opened to comprehend what and how much was meant by classical scholarship'; at least the dullest of us saw men as trees walking.' We were taught how to study. We were compelled to some degree of accuracy and thoroughness in our lessons. He gave us some insight into the meaning and spirit of the works we studied. renderings of words, phrases, passages of Virgil, and Sallust, could not be forgotten. Following, as they so often did, his exposition of the syntax of a sentence, or of some allusion, or his revelation of the radical meaning of a word, they were as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies. And it does seem to me that they were models in the way of translation. They had not only the merit of fidelity to the exact meaning of the original; they were given in English that was idiomatic, concise, elegant. Had he chosen to edit Virgil, I believe he would have resembled Conington in some of his brightest excellences as an annotator and translator.

His

That he was a most patient workman upon all the material put under his hands, however unpromising, all his pupils can and must realise, in looking back; and appreciate the fact that his power or genius to fashion and to train equalled his rare scholarship and his ability to instruct."

1

ARTICLE VIII.

NOTES ON EGYPTOLOGY.

BY JOSEPH P. THOMPSON, D.D., LL.D., NEW YORK.

THE war has seriously interrupted the publication of works on Egypt at their two principal centres, Paris and Berlin; yet the very last invoice from Paris, before the siege, embraced three volumes of unusual value. One of these was the first in the long-promised issue of the results of Mariette-Bey's explorations. Acting under the authorization of the Khedive, with men and means provided by the government, M. Mariette has been enabled to prosecute his researches for a series of years without interruption or delay; and his scientific method of excavating ruins has led to many discoveries and few disappointments. The museum at Boulak is his creation; and Egypt, no longer the spoil of foreign governments, will there preserve the treasures of her own antiquity. But the superb volumes now coming out under the auspices of Ismaïl Pacha will lay the results of Mariette's labors before the scholars of other nations, as fully as if Egypt were immediately under their eyes. Volume first is occupied solely with a description of the temple of Sethos I. at Abydos, — the principal seat of the worship of Osiris,- and consists of thirty pages of letterpress and upwards of a hundred folio plates.1

From indications of its former grandeur yet remaining in his day, Strabo ranked Abydos next to Thebes in magnitude and importance among the cities of Upper Egypt. This celebrity, however, was due less to its real importance as a city, than to its fame as a sacred city, and to the richness of its temples. As the chief seat of the worship of Osiris — the one universal divinity of Egypt-it attracted to its shrines pilgrims from all parts of the country; and to accommodate this concourse of worshippers the temples of the city were numerous and extensive.

M. Mariette laments the paucity of the results of his explorations among the ruins of the ancient city - here and there a stone, a mutilated statue, or a diminutive temple being his only reward outside the precincts of the temple of Sethos; and even this yielded far less than would be expected from a monument so large and so complete. As a rule, the Pharaonic

1 Abydos. Description des fouilles exécutées sur l'emplacement de cette ville par Auguste Mariette-Bey. Ouvrage publie sous les auspices de S. A. Ismaïl Pacha, Khedive d'Egypte. Paris: Librairie A. Franck, Rue de Richelieu. 1869. 2 Book xvii. chap. i. sec. 42.

temples are much more chary of explanatory inscriptions than the GrecoEgyptian temples of the Ptolemaic period. In the latter, the design of the temple, the attributes of the divinities, and the meaning of the ceremonies are all made plain; but in the former there is an intentional mystery or reserve upon these points, so that one is left in doubt as to the philosophical or religious idea of the temple itself, and the origin, date, or significance of the ceremonies pictured on its walls. Nevertheless, this great temple of Osiris, which Strabo styled the Memnonium, and likened to the Labyrinth, is now unveiled; its walls and pillars lie before us in detail in these splendid plates, and the key to its inner mysteries may yet be found.

That this temple which impressed Strabo so strongly had always a special interest for travellers is evident from the numerous graffiti, both Greek and Phenician, upon its stairways and corridors. The Phenicians rendered honors to Osiris; and other temples of his in Egypt bear records of Phenician visitors upon their walls. Abydos, being the terminus of the route from the oasis of El-Khargeh to Egypt, was much frequented by the Libyan tribes of the western desert.

The temple is divided into seven longitudinal naves, which open upon the façade by seven doors, and terminate in a corresponding number of arched halls or sanctuaries. The arch is here very distinctly introduced for architectural purposes. These halls are dedicated to Horus, Isis, Osiris, Ammon-who occupies the central one, Armachis, Ptah, and the king, who is here enshrined among the gods. The walls and pillars are covered mainly with religious scenes and symbols; the sculptures are upon a scale of unusual grandeur; and the hieroglyphics are cut with remarkable neatness and precision. A favorite scene, several times repeated, represents the princes and princesses of the family of Ramses going in procession to the altars of the gods, with offerings of animals, fruits, flowers, bread. Again, the king himself offers to Isis incense, flowers, fruits, victuals, wine, oil; while Isis, in turn, gives to him the symbols of power, and pours over him the water of lustration.

Another series of pictures represents the ceremonies prescribed for the king upon entering certain chambers of the gods, and the details of these compose a ritual that should satisfy the extremest devotee of St. Albans. There are instructions how to enter the door, how to prostrate himself so as to touch the ground with his fingers, how to adore the god and the goddess, each four times in turn, how many grains of incense to use in one and another of the offerings, how to put on the purple band, how to put on the green band, how to put on the white band — in a word, the whole ceremonial is here exhibited upon a scale of magnificence that puts to the blush the tawdry imitations of modern ritualism.

The temple is remarkable for the deification of the monarch during his lifetime. In one scene Sethos is represented as a sphinx; and in others he personates Osiris himself.

Phallic worship is strikingly and somewhat grossly portrayed in a scene where Osiris is sleeping upon a funeral couch, holding the phallus in his right hand, and pressing his left hand to his forehead, Horus and Isis standing by. This was intended to represent the dread mystery of life and resuscitation, about which the whole legend of Osiris revolves.

The temple of Abydos, begun by Sethos, was completed by Ramses, and one of its grandest scenes represents Sethos receiving the felicitations of his royal son and of several divinities upon the work of piety so successfully achieved. Ramses opens the tribute, describing how the gods had assisted in the work, by marking out the boundaries of the temple and consecrating the wall, the pillars, and the sanctuaries as these in turn were completed. Then the goddess Sefek presents her congratulations : "Sethos has been established as king upon the throne of the sun; the world has been given him as a balance, which he holds in equilibrium by his beneficent virtue; the whole earth is filled with his fame; he is the guardian of sleep, the light of darkness." Next Toum addresses the king: "I am satisfied with thy deeds; I have united for thee the south and the north, and have placed them under thy feet. I have joined the plant of the south to the plant of the north, [i.e. the symbol of the two sections blended in one crown] to make thee king of Upper and Lower Egypt." Finally Thoth addresses to the monarch his felicitations: "The memory of Sethos shall endure for thousands of years. All the world shall gather unto the temple that he has founded. All the gods shall there repose. He has enriched their altars. He has purified the sanctuaries. He has multiplied their offerings. In strengthening himself, he has fortified Egypt. He has spread his wings over her inhabitants. He has been to her a wall of granite." Such panegyrics rival those of Babylon in Oriental hyperbole.

The most important contribution of the Abydos temple to Egyptology is the now famous list of kings- the seventy-six royal predecessors to whom Sethos is offering homage. The list begins with Menes and has scarcely a break. A full description of it was given in the Bibliotheca Sacra for October 1867, p. 774.

Philology and Archaeology — M. A. Franck of Paris has commenced the publication of a serial, to be devoted to matters of philology and archaeology, both Egyptian and Assyrian. One number only has appeared, and this gives neither the name of the editor nor a prospectus of the magazine. It is to be hoped that it does not represent a new rivalry among the limited number of scholars in these departments; but with the Revue Archéologique at Paris and the Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde at Berlin, both freely open to scholars of all countries, and both encouraging the impartial discussion of disputed questions, one hardly sees the need of another journal for the same limited field. It imposes a new tax upon students who wish to keep pace with these spec