plete freedom in the exercise of their religion in return for their taxes. The Greeks were clear-sighted enough to understand their own interests; they were too philosophical and large minded for any fanatical persecution of, or even hindrance to, the national religion; they were too much of connoisseurs to fail in respect to a form of civilization whose prodigious antiquity they divined, and before which the most eminent among them were ever inclined to bow, like youths before an old man, or a parvenu before the descendant of a long line of kings.
Thus Egypt gradually fell into the hands of strangers after the commencement of the fourth century before Christ. Ethiopians, Assyrians and Persians had by turns overrun the country. Great numbers of the Phœnicians had established themselves in it, and, after the fall of Jerusalem and Samaria, many Jews followed their example. Finally, the Greeks came in by thousands through the breaches which their predecessors had made, penetrating into all parts, and making everywhere felt the superiority of a people who had, by appropriating the useful results obtained in a long succession of centuries by more ancient races, become wealthier, stronger, and better instructed than any of their forerunners.
Thus Egypt lost her power of national rejuvenation, her power of rising again after calamity. She existed on through the centuries by mere force of habit, but she lived no more. Her population was so homogeneous, and her institutions were so solid, that the social conditions of the country could not be changed in a day or even in a century. The teachings of her religion had been established by so long a course of development, and the hands of her artists were so well practised, that the monumental types which had been created in more fertile periods of her history were reproduced until a late date, in a machine-like and instinctive fashion. Imagination was dead, and the best that could be hoped for was the faithful repetition of those forms which the genius of the race had conceived in its last moments of original thought.
Under the Sait princes, under the Psemetheks and Nekau, under Apries and Amasis, Egypt was delivered from her enemies and again became mistress of Syria and of the Island of Cyprus. She thus recovered confidence in herself and in her future, and a period ensued which had an art of its own with distinctive features which we shall endeavour to trace. In the intervals of precarious repose which characterized the Persian domination, the
