But while we are watching the success of Ptolemy’s plans, and the rise of this Greek monarchy at Alexandria, we cannot help being pained with the thought that the Kopts of Upper Egypt are forgotten, and asking whether it would not have been still better to have raised Thebes to the place which it once held, and to have recalled the days of Ramses, instead of trying what might seem the hopeless task of planting Greek arts in Africa.  But a review of this history will show that, as far as human forethought can judge, this could not have been done.  A people whose religious opinions were fixed against all change, like the pillars upon which they were carved, and whose philosophy had not noticed that men’s minds were made to move forward, had no choice but to be left behind and trampled on, as their more active neighbours marched onwards in the path of improvement.  If Thebes had fallen only on the conquest by Cambyses, if the rebellions against the Persians had been those of Kopts throwing off their chains and struggling for freedom, we might have hoped to have seen Egypt, on the fall of Darius, again rise under kings of the blood and language of the people; and we should have thought the gilded and half-hid chains of the Ptolemies were little better than the heavy yoke of the Persians.  This, however, is very far from having been the case.  We first see the kings of Lower Egypt guarding their thrones at Sais by Greek soldiers; and then, that every struggle of Inarus, of Nectanebo, and of Tachos, against the Persians, was only made by the courage and arms of Greeks hired in the Delta by Egyptian gold.  During the three hundred years before Alexander was hailed by Egypt as its deliverer, scarcely once had the Kopts, trusting to their own courage, stood up in arms against either Persians or Greeks; and the country was only then con-quered without a battle because the power and arms were already in the hands of the Greeks; because in the mixed races of the Delta the Greeks were so far the strongest, though not the most numerous, that a Greek kingdom rose there with the same ease, and for the same reasons, that an Arab kingdom rose in the same place nine centuries later.

[Illustration:  098.jpg NIT, GODDESS OF SAIS.]

[Illustration:  099.jpg A CAT MUMMY]

Moral worth, national pride, love of country, and the better feelings of clanship are the chief grounds upon which a great people can be raised.  These feelings are closely allied to self-denial, or a willingness on the part of each man to give up much for the good of the whole.  By this, chiefly, public monuments are built, and citizens stand by one another in battle; and these feelings were certainly strong in Upper Egypt in the days of its greatness.  But, when the throne was moved to Lower Egypt, when the kingdom was governed by the kings of Sais, and even afterwards, when it was struggling against the Persians, these virtues were wanting, and they trusted to foreign hirelings in their struggle for freedom.  The Delta was peopled by three races of men, Kopts, Greeks, and Phoenicians, or Arabs; and even before the sceptre was given to the Greeks by Alexander’s conquests, we have seen that the Kopts had lost the virtues needed to hold it.