Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
else than to tell his own long story, and listen to that of Calasiris in
return. The old Egyptian priest, however, is a sketch of considerable
merit. Like Scott's Peregrine Touchwood, though abundantly zealous at
all times to serve his friends, he cannot find it in his heart to take
any but the most round-about way of doing so; but he is never
disconcerted by any of the untoward results of his schemes, and relates
to Cnemon, with the most perfect self-complacency, the deceit which he
had practiced on his confiding host, Charicles, in helping Theagenes to
steal away his adopted daughter, and the various scrapes into which his
protegés had fallen under his guidance. He has, moreover, pet theories
of his own on the phenomena of the Nile, the cause of the roughness of
the Ionian Sea, and various other matters, in which he indoctrinates
Cnemon _par parenthèse_: he is an enthusiastic admirer and constant
quoter of Homer, whose Egyptian birth (at Thebes the hundred-gated) he
maintains with all the zeal of a Highlander defending the authenticity
of Ossian; and, on the whole, we cannot but think the author has
scarcely used him well, in not allowing him to live to see his efforts
crowned with success, and to enjoy the honours which would doubtless
have been heaped upon him at the court of Ethiopia.
The author appears to take especial delight in accounts of costumes,
processions, sacrifices, &c.; the details given of which are often
valuable in an antiquarian point of view; and his information upon these
subjects, as well as of the manners of the country in which the scene is
laid, as far as our knowledge of the present day will enable us to
decide, is extremely correct. One of the most curious morceaux of this
sort, is a minute description of the complete armour for horse and man,
worn by the élite of the cavalry in the army of Oroondates; and which,
though probably taken from that used by the troops of the Sassanian
monarchs cotemporary with Heliodorus, is equally applicable to the
period at which the scene is laid; since numerous passages in ancient
authors show, that from the earliest time up to the Mohammedan conquest,
the Persian nobles and heavy cavalry used panoply as impenetrable as the
European chivalry of the middle ages. Among the other scattered traits
of manners, it will be remarked as singular, according to the ideas of
the present day, that open piracy and robbery are neither spoken of as
disreputable, nor as attaching any slur to those who exercised them;
insomuch, that the notoriety of Thyamis, having been a chief of
freebooters, is not regarded as any obstacle to his assumption of the
high-priesthood. But this, it will be found, was strictly in accordance
with the manners of the ancient Greeks, among whom piracy was so far
from being looked upon in any other light than that of an honourable
profession, that Nestor himself, in the third book of the Odyssey, asks
his guests, Telemachus and Mentor, as an ordinary question, whether
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