The writer sees, in one compartment, the master of a family. He is evidently opulent--a man of large possessions--a landlord; he has his people round him--ploughing, sowing, harrowing, reaping, thrashing, winnowing. But the landlord is also a sportsman; he has round him game, geese, and fish. He is also a man of luxury; he has a barge on the river, and a pavilion built upon it. He is also a man of hospitality; there is a banquet, with the master and his wife in a great chair; every lady has a flower in her hand; a monkey is tied to the host's chair; and there are musicians with a harp and the double pipe. But there is also a final scene; the host dies, the banquets are no more, his _mummy_ is in the consecrated boat, which is to carry him over the river of death, and which deposits him in the land unknown. All this is ingenious and probable, and if Miss Martineau had confined herself to the picturesque, had sported her fancies in Egypt alone, and never ventured beyond the Red Sea, we might close the book, giving it all the praise due to an original and lively narrative. But when she plays the theologian, we must stop, as we wish that she had done. On leaving Egypt, her party turn their faces towards the Wilderness; and here the pen of the rash writer rambles away into lucubrations, neither consistent with the facts of history, nor suitable to the feelings of the scene. She begins by manufacturing a romance for Moses. She first tells us that he was "of the priestly _caste_," a matter rendered utterly improbable by the declaration of Scripture, that "by _faith_, when he was come to years, he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God." She then proceeds to tell us a great many things, of which Moses has told us nothing: for example, that in the desert, which she regards as a place peculiarly "fruitful of meditation," (we doubt whether it produces much of this fruit among the Bedouins,) Moses and "_Mahomet after him_" (valuable companionship!) learned from the Past how to prophesy of the future. "There," says Miss Martineau, "as Moses sat under the shrubby palm, and its moist rock, did the Past come at the call of his instructed memory, and tell him how those mighty Egyptians had been slaves, as his Hebrew brethren now were," &c., and came to the conclusion (by no means an unnatural one in any case of slavery,) "that the Hebrews must be _removed_ and educated, before they could be established." We then arrive at the confidential part of the story.