A little to the south of the Rameseum is the third of these temple-places. It is that of the third Rameses. This, though not so grand and pure in style as the Rameseum, has been better preserved. Upon it, and within it, are the ruins of a Coptic town. The crude brick tenements perched on the roof, and adhering to the walls of the mighty structure, reminded me of the disfigurements of the obelisk of Heliopolis, and of the propylons of Dendera, by the mud-cells which insect architecture had plastered over them. So wags the world. Squalid poverty had succeeded to imperial splendour. But the same fate had waited upon both. The towers of kings, and the hovels of the poor, are now equally desolate and untenanted. One of the courts of the palace had been metamorphosed by the Copts of the neighbourhood into their church. From the expense which must have been incurred in effecting this transformation it is evident that they once formed here a numerous body. The community, however, has entirely disappeared from this place, and nothing—absolutely nothing—has come in its stead. They say in the East that where the Turk sets his foot grass will not grow; but this is true of El Islam generally. It is great at pulling down and destroying, but not equally great at reconstructing. The Christian church and the Egyptian temple are alike deserted. The old Egyptian and the Coptic Christian have both completely vanished from this scene. It is curious as we stand here, with equal evidence before us of the equal fate of both, to observe how little people think about the fate of the latter in comparison with what they think about the fate of the former; and yet there are, at all events, some reasons to dispose us favourably, and sympathizingly, towards our Coptic co-religionists. If the causes of the feeling could be analyzed, would it be found to have arisen from a half-formed thought that there was no gratitude to be felt to the poor Copt for anything he had done, and that the world had no hope of anything from him? Or would it be because there is really little to interest the thought in the fortunes of a community, of which we know little more than that, by having changed the law of liberty into a petrified doctrine, they had gone a long way towards committing moral and intellectual suicide? In one of the private apartments of this temple-palace of Rameses III. the sculptures represent the king seated on a chair, which would not be out of place at Windsor, or Schönbrunn. His daughters are standing around him, offering him fruit and flowers, and agitating the air with their fans. He amuses himself with a game of drafts, and with their conversation.