buffoons and tricksters, wretched ventriloquists,
miserable experts at sleight of hand
and cogging of dice." Came the Romans, and
with them the loud prating augurs, and the
bragging soothsayers, and those that dealt in
omens and prophecies. But the Magicians
who had wrought magic for the Ptolemies
laughed these clumsy bunglers to scorn.
When Pompey, Cæsar, Antony told them of
the supernatural wonders of Greece and
Rome; of the ghastly priests who reigned
beneath the deep shadow of Aricia's trees,

            "The priest who slew the slayer.
              And shall himself be slain;"

of the thirty chosen prophets, the wisest
in the land, who evening and morning stood
by Lars Porsenna of Clusium; of the strange
visions of pale women with bleeding breasts
that Sextus Tarquinius saw in the night
season; of the Pythoness on her tripod, and
the Cumæan Sybil in her cave; the Magicians
of Egypt pointed to the Sphynx, the pyramids,
the hieroglyphics, saying: "Construe
us these, and unriddle us these. Liars, and
boasters, and whisperers through chinks in
the wall, and fumblers among the entrails of
beasts, can ye call, as we can, serpents from
the hard ground, and cause them to dance to
the notes of the cithara and the timbrel? Can
ye foretell life and death, and change men
into beasts and reptiles, and show in a drop
of water the images of men that are dead,
and great battles fought long ago?

The proud conquerors of Egypt bowed
to Egypt's soothsayers. The Magician was
welcome in Cleopatra's palace. He boasted
that he could read in "Nature's infinite book
of sorcery;" Iras, Alexas, Enobarbus, listened
to him, and he foretold truly that one should
outlive the lady whom she loved, and that
another should be more beloving than
beloved. The Magician stood in Cleopatra's
galley beside the proud and stately queen,
—the "serpent of old Nile," that was "with
Phoebus' am'rous pinches black;" in the
galley that burned in the water like
burnished gold; the galley with purple sails and
silver oars; with a pavilion cloth of gold of
tissue; the galley whereof the gentlewomen
were like the Nereides, on each side of which
stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling
Cupids; the galley steered by a seeming
mermaid; the galley with silken tackle, and
from which a strange invisible perfume hit
the sense of the adjacent wharves. And
when Antony lay dead, and the proud land of
Egypt lay at the feet of Octavius Cæsar, the
ominous finger of the soothsayer pointed to
the basket of figs and the "pretty worm of
Nilus"—the deadly asp, the baby at the
breast of Cleopatra that sucked the nurse
asleep.

Ages of youth have not been able to efface
the Magic from the Egyptian surface. Its
edge has been blunted, as the characters in
the hieroglyphics have been, some rounded
and chipped, some choked up with sand and
dust. But the ruins of Magic yet exist like
the ruins of temples and statues. The rage
of the heathen Saracens, the iconoclastic
theology of centuries of Mohammedan sway,
have battered, have defaced, have devastated
the caryatides that supported the frieze of
the temple of Egyptian Magic; but the temple
and the caryatides are erect still. The fires
that destroyed the stored-up learning of
Alexandria have been impotent to quench it; the
devastating hoofs of the steeds of the
Mamelukes and the Beys have not trampled
it under foot; the hordes of Bonaparte, tired
by revolutionary and subversive frenzy, could
not annihilate it; the glamour of the East
vanquished the atheism of the West, and the
Egyptian seer warned Kleber, though
unavailingly, of the dagger that was to lay him
low. Even now, in this age—in this
nineteenth century—when English cadets and
judges of Sudder Adawlut jolt in omnibuses
across the Isthmus of Suez; when steamers
have coal depots at Alexandria; when Cairo
has European hotels with table d'hôtes and
extortionate waiters; when the sandy desert
is strewn, not with the bones of men slain in
fight, or with the ruins of bygone empires,
but with the crumbs of ham sandwiches and
the corks of soda-water bottles; when the
"cruel lord" who reigns over Egypt drives
an English curricle; when a staff of English
engineers view Thebes and Memphis through
theodolites, and talk of gradients and inclines,
tunnels, cuttings, and embankments through
the valley of the Nile, Magic and Magicians
hold their own in the sunburnt land of Egypt.
In some dark street of Cairo still is the
traveller introduced to the seer, fallen indeed
from his high estate, with diminished credit,
and circumscribed empire over things magical,
still versed in "Nature's infinite book of
sorcery." No longer the proud confidant of
princes and monarchs, the explicator of
enigmas, the unraveller of mysteries, the
expounder of dreams and visions of the night,
he is but a meanly-clad old man with a long
beard and a filthy turban swathed round his
head. But still he pours into the palm of
the youthful acolyte the mystic pool of ink,
and traces around it the magic characters
which none may read but he. And still the
boy, at his command, sees in the inky mirror
"the figure of one sweeping," and after him
are mirrored in the pool, as the traveller
summons them, the portraits of the mighty
dead, or the friends or dear ones at home.
And though sometimes the Magician may err,
and Lord Nelson present himself with two
arms, and Miss Biffin with both arms and
legs, and Daniel Lambert as a thin man, and
Shakespeare with a cocked hat and spectacles,
you must ascribe that to its being Ramadan,
or the boy not being a proper medium, or
yourself not properly susceptible to magical
influences.

I have said enough, I perpend, Scholar,