on the Transfiguration. These things show what we may well call the mind of the Church; and the same uniform spirit may be traced in ceremonies and ritual observances, in which a thoughtful devotion will seldom fail to find very beautiful and instructive meanings.

Though the Anglican system has preserved more of Catholic ceremonial and arrangement than many others, and though its Prayerbook is almost entirely formed of Catholic fragments, it would probably be very easy to point out numberless instances in which, under the pretence of cutting off what was superfluous and luxuriant, the English reformers have shattered and ruined the most touching and significant features of the ancient materials on which they worked. At all events, if the poetry of the ritual be not entirely marred, ninetenths of it has been distorted and disfigured. Enough is left to awaken the longing desire for more; enough to inspire the plaintive strains of the Christian Year and the Lyra Innocentium; not enough to put it in the power of the author of those works to unfold all or half of the beauties that deserve a poetic treatment as classically Christian as his. It is said that in the last century, after the suppression of the Society of Jesus, one who had been a member of the extinct body was invited to preach a panegyric on the feast of its founder. In the course of it he claimed to be singularly fitted for such a task; no one could praise the work of St. Ignatius who belonged to the Society-no one could understand what that work had been who did not. He had the knowledge that was requisite, and the position which made the full use of that knowledge becoming. We say something analogous, though not quite the same, about the beauties of Catholic ritual and ceremonial. It may be that those who have been all their lives familiar with them are like the natives of beautiful and bountiful climates, who have been born and bred among scenes which travellers come from the ends of the earth to visit. They have drunk in the influences around them from their childhood, but they have seldom reflected upon them. Their whole nature, moral and physical, has been affected by them; they move with an unconscious grace, and surprise their visitors by flashes of lofty thought and the simple poetry and music of their language; but they cannot describe to themselves or to others the beauties and grandeur among which they have always lived; they do not even feel them or recognise them. The stranger from some bleak and cloudy land sketches their landscapes, their ruins, their costumes, with eagerness, and grows eloquent in his explanation of treasures of which the owners are unconscious. So it may be an advantage, in this respect, to have stood at the door before entering the wondrous palace which

the Church has provided for the devotion of her children; to have listened from without to the pealing music, softened by distance, and to have gazed wistfully at the twinkling lights and solemn movements within the half-veiled sanctuary. But again, to understand and appreciate all-much more to interpret it to others, and to call forth for their delight and instruction the harmonies that

"slumber in their shell,"

-this is something which cannot be given to a stranger. Catholicism is not like a nationality, which cannot be truly and thoroughly acquired; its language is not one that may not be mastered if it has not been learnt naturally. It draws no line between those who are within its pale, though some may come late and others early. It has a divine power of moulding and transforming all that are unreservedly under its influence. If it does not stamp all with the true type, it is because its action has been impeded by strong self-will or self-conceit. All can find themselves at home in the Church, if they will-the labourers of the eleventh hour as well as those of the first. But they must be the children of the Church to be at home in her; and though she has wandering children and children stolen from her against their will, on whose ear her music will not grate, and who are continually drawn by the instincts of their new birth and the cravings of their nature to the rich stores of life and happiness which are their inheritance, still they cannot sing her songs in a strange land; the air of exile dims their eyes and makes their ears hard of hearing, and locks up in unwilling silence tongues that might otherwise have sung her glories in strains of the loftiest poetry.

It is idle to conjecture how Mr. Keble might have written, or might write, of the Catholic system, if by his devotion to our Blessed Lady, or in some other way, he had been led, or were still to be led, to submit to the Catholic Church. We have already remarked that he cannot be considered as having illustrated systematically and thoroughly the far less rich and complete arrangement set before him in the Prayer-book. The Sunday "lessons" have furnished him with the greater number of subjects for his poems. It was a happy thought to connect many of them with the course of the Christian Year; but they might have appeared as fitly as meditations suggested by Scripture. We cannot, however, doubt that a mind like that of Mr. Keble would have glowed with fresh inspiration under the full influence of the Catholic system. Such has not been his lot. The Liturgy and Ritual of the Church might well occupy the labour of a whole school of poetic illustrators. Their beauties are not only multitudinous, but ever-varying; they possess

that wonderful quality of versatility and adaptation to different times, different needs, moods, states of conscience, grief or joy, hope or despondency, and the like, which reminds us of the changeful sympathies of nature or of the higher forms of human friendship. As the Lord's Prayer or the Holy Mass can never be, as it were, exhausted, and no possible variety of condition or phase of human existence lies beyond the sphere of their Divine consolation, so to the priest or the layman, to the secular or the religious, to young and old, poor and rich, mourners and lonely souls, as well as to devout Christians in the brightest moments of their earthly course, the ordinances, ritual, and services of the Church will always be found teeming with the spiritual good most adapted to the condition of each. We need not wonder at the richness of the mine, when we remember that these services embrace the whole series of mysteries that constitute the groundwork of Christian doctrine, the whole providence of God towards the human race and individual souls, the contents of Scripture, the graces, sacramental and other, by which human life is upheld from the dawn of existence to its passage into the world beyond the grave, piercing even beyond its frontiers, as well as the lives and actions of the Incarnate God and the countless orders and degrees of His saints. What can a single poet do in the presence of so vast a subject? He must content himself with striking his few notes in harmony with the spirit that animates the whole system, happy if he can point out a portion of its treasures, and suggest trains of holy and consoling thought which his readers may follow up for themselves.

Canon Oakeley has many qualifications to fit him for so modest an undertaking. If the beauties in which the mind of the Church has unfolded itself strike with a fresh and peculiar charm upon those who have been led within her pale after the experience of a state of exile, he has so far the right to rejoice, not that he was originally outside her precincts, but that from outside he has found his way within. He has a well-stored and well-trained mind, and he has not now for the first time given proof that his attitude within the Church has been such as to give him the fairest chance of drinking in her spirit with full humility, and allowing it without resistance to penetrate and impregnate his every thought and feeling. Then he has a quick perception of the beautiful and the true, a lively fancy, a refined taste, a sound judgment, and an ease and grace of expression that seems equally unfailing whether in prose or verse. He will never write any thing bad, or out of taste, or rugged, or unscholarlike. His is, perhaps, one of those minds that have the next best gift to that of original genius-the power first of grasping an idea and adopting a

beautiful thought, and then of setting it forth clearly and brightly. It may be that, as to the idea of his book, he is so far a scholar of Mr. Keble as that the Lyra Liturgica* would never have been written but for the Christian Year. But Mr. Keble's idea admitted of application to a more complete and harmonious range of subjects than was within his reach, and Canon Oakeley stands on ground from which that range can be surveyed. It may be that if the two books be compared together with reference to the theory of poetry of which we have spoken, Mr. Keble's is the fruit of a genuine poetic feeling, seeking relief in its own natural way; while Canon Oakeley's is more a set of pious and pleasing meditations, the congenial recreation of a thoughtful scholar. Nor are we disposed to maintain that the Catholic volume contains any such exquisite and lofty strains of poetry of the first order, which have placed the Christian Year and the Lyra Innocentium so far above all other compositions of the same kind in the present generation. It is enough that Canon Oakeley has attempted a work very good in itself, and has executed it, as far as he has gone, with a grace that has not marred the beauty of his subject. When the subject is the most beautiful that can be imagined, this is praise of which no one need be ashamed.

* Lyra Liturgica. Reflections in Verse for Holy Days and Seasons. London, 1865. (We hope to notice Canon Oakeley's volume more at length elsewhere.)

Egypt in the British Museum.

PART I.

WHAT a charm there is about the land of Egypt! Our very earliest recollections are linked with that strange country. As children, we heard of it in connection with Joseph and his brethren; as schoolboys, we associated it with the marvellous stories contained in the hardest book of Herodotus. Belzoni introduced us to many of its temples in those small octavo editions of Books for the Young, which were rendered attractive, thirty or forty years ago, by three pictures in a page, illustrative of the letter-press; and we have known a person who could never hear a sonata of Beethoven without almost seeing the natives dancing on the banks of the Nile, because when a boy he had heard that music played while reading Belzoni's description. Then we were taken to the British Museum; and while our taste was formed by our attention being drawn to the perfections of Grecian art, and we thought that we really appreciated all the beauties of the Theseus and the Пlyssus, the metopes and the frieze of the Parthenon, we treated with some contempt the works of Egyptian sculptors, and yet we could not help being impressed with the great big fist and the long arm, and the Rosetta stone, and young Memnon above all.

Perhaps it may be possible to give a little interest to some of the Egyptian monuments in the British Museum by selecting a few, assigning their chronological order, and associating the period of their erection with the events of sacred history. If we undertake this task, the first preliminary will be to lay down that system of Egyptian history which has the best claims on our acceptance. It is not our intention to enter into controversy; and we will only assure Egyptologists-we neither like the word nor the tone of mind usually associated with it-that we are fully aware of the existence of two schools of opinion,-of the long chronologists, and of the short chronologists, and that with malice prepense we adhere to that system of chronology which falls in with the chronology of the Septuagint.

We must start with coming to a clear understanding with our readers on the use of certain expressions. We speak of dynasties of