time that in these labours they had at all times an eye to their
darling object, an ascendancy over the minds of their countrymen at
large, and the extorting from them a blind and implicit deference to
their oracular decrees. They however loved their pursuits for the
pursuits themselves. They felt their abstraction and their unlimited
nature, and on that account contemplated them with admiration. They
valued them (for such is the indestructible character of the human
mind) for the pains they had bestowed on them. The sweat of their brow
grew into a part as it were of the intrinsic merit of the articles;
and that which had with so much pains been attained by them, they
could not but regard as of inestimable worth.


EGYPT.

The Egyptians took the lead in early antiquity, with respect to
civilisation and the stupendous productions of human labour and art,
of all other known nations of the world. The pyramids stand by
themselves as a monument of the industry of mankind. Thebes, with her
hundred gates, at each of which we are told she could send out at once
two hundred chariots and ten thousand warriors completely accoutred,
was one of the noblest cities on record. The whole country of Lower
Egypt was intersected with canals giving a beneficent direction to the
periodical inundations of the Nile; and the artificial lake Moeris was
dug of a vast extent, that it might draw off the occasional excesses
of the overflowings of the river. The Egyptians had an extraordinary
custom of preserving their dead, so that the country was peopled
almost as numerously with mummies prepared by extreme assiduity and
skill, as with the living.