advised him to signalize his ambition more effectually, even in Europe, by seizing on a province which promised a more easy and profitable victory than the swamps and sands of the Dutch. He justly told the King that he could not pursue a Dutch war without exciting the jealousy of Europe. "It is in Egypt," said he, "that the true blow can be struck." He then laboured to show, that the possession would give him the road to India, and put her I opulent trade into his hands; that it would thus engross the real sources of the wealth of Holland-extinguish the competitorship of Europe -and, by making the Mediterranean a French lake, virtually place Louis on the throne of Europe. Louis was fortunately as self-willed as he I was sanguinary; he preferred the nearer conquest; brought on himself the arms of England and Europe, was hunted up to the gates of Versailles; and ought to have been hanged on | those gates, with his whole ministry round him, if justice had been done.

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A quarter of a century before the French Revolution, Savary, one of these scientific infidels who poisoned the public mind and prepared that Revolution, had gone to Egypt, and given a description of it in the na■tional style, a flourish of romance, in which every thing was dipped in colours of the rainbow, and the appetite of the nation was again excited to seize on this African paradise.

On the conquest of of Italy, in 1797, the project of seizing Egypt was adopted by the Directory. It offered various temptations to that atrocious underhand policy, which regards every thing but justice. To Napoleon, the command of a fleet and army, which would keep him before the eyes of France to the Directory, the opportunity of getting rid of a too popular general and unemployed army for the time and to the nation, that phantasm of national glory which is always able to delude France. We can find no counteracting opinion at the timeno honest remonstrance against the utter villany of plundering an ancient ally, and the utter impolicy of showing that with France treaties were waste paper; we cannot find even any humane and natural protest against the actual murder of the multitude of men, Frenchmen as well as Turks and Arabs, who must perish in the

invasion. On the contrary, all France was in exultation at the sight of the vast armament gathered for the purpose at Toulon; and neither among her people nor her priesthood was one warning voice raised against this preparative for wholesale robbery and slaughter.

In the beginning all seemed fortunate. The expedition sailed, escaped the British fleet, reached Malta, of which it became possessed by corruption; and turning out the weak and perfidious knights, placed in it a French garrison, and then reached Alexandria in safety, made its spirit known by putting 1200 of the garrison to the sword, and in a few days was in possession of the country.

But it is well worth remarking, that perhaps no expedition ever more disinctly failed in all its principal objects. Its seizure of Malta gave that great fortress finally into the hands of the English, by whom it had been immediately besieged, and taken with its garrison. But the first retributive blow was the destruction of the whole French fleet at Aboukir. The next was the defeat of Bonaparte himself, by Sir Sydney Smith and the Turks, at Acre. This was followed by the successive defeats of the French by the British army, until not a man of that expedition remained in Egypt but as a prisoner.

Yet the punishment did not end there. France was to be scourged, and the lash fell upon her with matchless severity. The Allies, encouraged by the absence of the last general and best army of France, poured fresh troops into Italy. The Russian Government, relieved from all fears on the side of Turkey, by the irritation of the French attack on a Turkish province, sent the celebrated Suwarrow with a strong force to Italy. He swept the French before him, and recovered the entire country in a single rapid but most bloody campaign. It was computed that, in killed and prisoners, France lost one hundred thousand men in Italy before the end of the year. Thus the fruits of the single atrocity of invading Egypt, and of slaughtering unfortunate Turks and Arabs without a cause, was the loss of two great armies-of Italy-of the most important station of the Mediterranean for ever, and of all hopes of possessing Egypt, which they not improbably might have ohtained by purchase from the necessi. ties of Turkey. Even the more minute objects were failures. The Directory wholly failed in keeping Napoleon at a distance, for he contrived to return, however disreputably. And even in his personal instance, nothing but the accidental circumstances of the country could have saved him from ruin. His defeats in Syria had thrown a cloud on his military reputation, which would have enabled the Directory to bring him to a court-martial for desertion. But he was saved for a heavier fall. The loss of the Italian campaign, under Joubert and Macdonald, alone protected him at the

moment.

He was received by the people, in their emergency, as the sole hope of the country. The battle of Marengo turned the tide again, and that larger course of infliction began, which he was evidently reserved to put in mo. tion against Europe. Yet what were even his greatest victories but

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many new shapes of suffering, in which France herself shared with unbroken powers of the Continent, in which hundreds of thousands of her people were sacrificed, only to bring an enemy twice to Paris, to lay the country at the feet of Europe; and even in the instance of that wonder of genius and fortune himself, only to make him the most memorable victim of humiliation that the world has ever seen the blasted figure of a colossal ambition.

The battle of Aboukir was one of the most singular and one of the most momentous, in naval annals. Nelson, after having twice traversed the Mediterranean in chase of the French, first saw them on the 1st of August, (1798,) drawn up in line, at the anchorage of Aboukir, with their broadsides to the sea, and protected by guns on the shore. He advanced straight to the mark the moment he saw them, at three in the afternoon. The number of ships on both sides was equal-each thirteen sail of the line; but the French had great advantage in guns and men, their ships carrying 1196 guns, and 11,230 men; while the British had but 1012 guns, and 8068 men. The enemy had a still more important advantage in the size of their ships, having the L'Orient of 120 guns and the Franklin and Guillaume Tell of 80; while the British

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were all seventy-fours. But they had what was more than equivalent to all other superiority-Nelson in command. Nelson, by throwing a part of his force between the enemy and the shore, accomplished the great manœuvre of bringing an overwhelm ing weight of fire on a part of the op. posing line. Five ships had thus passed inside the French line, while six ranged outside. After boldly sustaining this storm of fire for six hours, the enemy's ships began to strike; and flames were soon after seen from the Admiral's ship, the L'Orient. The blaze rapidly covered this magnificant vessel, and threw a light on the con tending fleets, the surrounding sea, and the shore, on which French troops and Arabs had gathered to see the battle. At length she blew up, with an explosion so tremendous as to shake every ship, and cover them with blazing fragments. Nelson, though wounded severely in the head, and carried below decks, on hearing that the L'Orient was on fire, got up alone, and made his way to the quarterdeck, when, with that humanity which formed so conspicuous a part of his gallant nature, he ordered his boats out to save the enemy's officers and seamen who were jumping overboard.

By daylight the victory was seen to be complete. Of the thirteen French sail of the line, two were burned and nine taken; of their four frigates, one was burned and one sunk-two sail of the line and two frigates alone escaping, from the inability of the crippled English ships to follow them. The British loss was 895 killed and wounded. Tho enemy's loss was dreadful: 5225 killed; 3105 wounded and prisoners, subsequently sent on shore, on their parole, not to serve until exchanged. But Napoleon, who despised such punctilios, instantly incorporated into his army all who were able to march, and made a regiment out of those remnants of the battle.

The mighty warrior who gained this victory became instantly and justly the object of European admiration. He was loaded with honours by the Allied Courts; England gave him a pension of L.2000 a-year, with that title which he had so nobly contemplated on his first sight of the enemy: "Before this time to-morrow I shall have gained a peerage, or Westminster Abbey."

We have sketched rapidly, in the first part of our essay, some outline of a theory with regard to the Essenes, confining ourselves to such hints as are suggested by the accounts of this sect in Josephus. And we presume that most readers will go along with us so far as to acknowledge some shock, some pause given to that blind acquiescence in the Bible statement which had hitherto satisfied them. By the Bible statement we mean, of course, nothing which any inspired part of the Bible tells us-on the contrary, one capital reason for rejecting the old notions is, the total silence of the Bible; but we mean that little explanatory note on the Essenes, which our Bible translators under James I. have thought fit to adopt, and in reality to adopt from Josephus, with a reliance on his authority which closer study would have shown to be unwarranted. We do not wonder that Josephus has been misappreciated by Christian readers. It is painful to read any author in a spirit of suspicion; most of all, that author to whom we must often look as our only guide. Upon Josephus we are compelled to rely for the most affecting section of ancient history. Merely as a scene of human passion, the main portion of his Wars transcends, in its theme, all other histories. But considered also as the agony of a mother church, out of whose ashes arose, like a phoenix, that filial faith "which passeth all understanding," the last conflict of Jerusalem and her glorious temple exacts from the devotional conscience as much interest as would otherwise be yielded by our human sympathies. For the circumstances of this struggle we must look to Josephus: him or none we must accept for witness. And in such a case, how painful to suppose a hostile heart in every word of his deposition! Who could bear to take the account of a dear friend's last hours and farewell words from one who confessedly hated him?-one word melting us to tears, and the next rousing us to the duty of jealousy and distrust! Hence we do not wonder at the pious

NO. CCXCIV, VOL. XLVII.

fraud which interpolated the wellknown passage about our Saviour. Let us read any author in those circumstances of time, place, or immediate succession to the cardinal events of our own religion, and we shall find it a mere postulate of the heart, a mere necessity of human feeling, that we should think of him as a Christian; or, if not absolutely that, as every way disposed to be a Christian, and falling short of that perfect light only by such clouds as his hurried life or his personal conflicts might interpose. We do not blame, far from it-we admire those who find it necessary (even at the cost of a little self-delusion) to place themselves in a state of charity with an author treating such subjects, and in whose company they were to travel through some thousands of pages. We also find it painful to read an author and to loathe him. We too would be glad to suppose, as a possibility about Josephus, what many adopt as a certainty. But we know too much. Unfortunately, we have read Josephus with too scrutinizing (and, what is more, with too combining) an eye. We know him to be an unprincipled man, and an ignoble man; one whose adhesion to Christianity would have done no honour to our faith one who most assuredly was not a Christian-one who was not even in any tolerable sense a Jewone who was an enemy to our faith, a traitor to his own: as an enemy, vicious and ignorant; as a traitor, steeped to the lips in superfluous baseness.

The vigilance with which we have read Josephus, has (amongst many other hints) suggested some with regard to the Essenes: and to these we shall now make our own readers a party; after stopping to say, that thus far, so far as we have gone already, we count on their assent to our theory, were it only from those considerations: First, the exceeding improbability that a known philosophic sect amongst the Jews, chiefly distinguished from the other two by its moral aspects, could have lurked unknown to the Evangelists; Secondly,

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