the cattle, are unequally shared between those who labor and those who possess. According to the vicissitudes of the seasons, the face of the country is adorned with a silver wave, a verdant emerald, and the deep yellow of a golden harvest." ^129 Yet this beneficial order is sometimes interrupted; and the long delay and sudden swell of the river in the first year of the conquest might afford some color to an edifying fable. It is said, that the annual sacrifice of a virgin ^130 had been interdicted by the piety of Omar; and that the Nile lay sullen and inactive in his shallow bed, till the mandate of the caliph was cast into the obedient stream, which rose in a single night to the height of sixteen cubits. The admiration of the Arabs for their new conquest encouraged the license of their romantic spirit. We may read, in the gravest authors, that Egypt was crowded with twenty thousand cities or villages: ^131 that, exclusive of the Greeks and Arabs, the Copts alone were found, on the assessment, six millions of tributary subjects, ^132 or twenty millions of either sex, and of every age: that three hundred millions of gold or silver were annually paid to the treasury of the caliphs. ^133 Our reason must be startled by these extravagant assertions; and they will become more palpable, if we assume the compass and measure the extent of habitable ground: a valley from the tropic to Memphis seldom broader than twelve miles, and the triangle of the Delta, a flat surface of two thousand one hundred square leagues, compose a twelfth part of the magnitude of France. ^134 A more accurate research will justify a more reasonable estimate. The three hundred millions, created by the error of a scribe, are reduced to the decent revenue of four millions three hundred thousand pieces of gold, of which nine hundred thousand were consumed by the pay of the soldiers. ^135 Two authentic lists, of the present and of the twelfth century, are circumscribed within the respectable number of two thousand seven hundred villages and towns. ^136 After a long residence at Cairo, a French consul has ventured to assign about four millions of Mahometans, Christians, and Jews, for the ample, though not incredible, scope of the population of Egypt. ^137
[Footnote 128: A small volume, des Merveilles, &c., de l'Egypte, composed in the xiiith century by Murtadi of Cairo, and translated from an Arabic Ms. of Cardinal Mazarin, was published by Pierre Vatier, Paris, 1666. The antiquities of Egypt are wild and legendary; but the writer deserves credit and esteem for his account of the conquest and geography of his native country, (see the correspondence of Amrou and Omar, p. 279 - 289.)]
[Footnote 129: In a twenty years' residence at Cairo, the consul Maillet had contemplated that varying scene, the Nile, (lettre ii. particularly p. 70, 75;) the fertility of the land, (lettre ix.) From a college at Cambridge, the poetic eye of Gray had seen the same objects with a keener glance: -
What wonder in the sultry climes that spread,
Where Nile, redundant o'er his summer bed,
From his broad bosom life and verdure flings,
And broods o'er Egypt with his watery wings:
If with adventurous oar, and ready sail,
The dusky people drive before the gale:
Or on frail floats to neighboring cities ride.
That rise and glitter o'er the ambient tide.
(Mason's Works and Memoirs of Gray, p. 199, 200.)]
[Footnote 130: Murtadi, p. 164 - 167. The reader will not easily credit a human sacrifice under the Christian emperors, or a miracle of the successors of Mahomet.]
[Footnote 131: Maillet, Description de l'Egypte, p. 22. He mentions this number as the common opinion; and adds, that the generality of these villages contain two or three thousand persons, and that many of them are more populous than our large cities.]
[Footnote 132: Eutych. Annal. tom. ii. p. 308, 311. The twenty millions are computed from the following data: one twelfth of mankind above sixty, one third below sixteen, the proportion of men to women as seventeen or sixteen, (Recherches