Necho was succeeded by his son Psammis; and he by the Apries of Herodotus, the Pharaoh Hophra of the Hebrew Scriptures. Egypt is still very rich and prosperous, and so he makes another attempt for the recovery of the dominion of Western Asia. In this effort he attacked Phœnicia both by sea and land. Still no change, or vacillation, is perceptible in the utterances of the Hebrew Prophets. They at all events are not misled, or dazzled, by the riches and greatness of Egypt. Ezekiel sees, just as Isaiah and Jeremiah had seen, that the valley of the Nile can no longer be the seat of Empire; and that the capacity for acquiring it had passed into the hands of their North-Eastern neighbours. In the reign of Amasis, the successor of Apries, “Egypt,” as Herodotus tells us, “reached the very acmé of its prosperity. Never before had the river been more bountiful to the land, or the land to those who dwelt in it. It contained 20,000 inhabited cities.” Such was the Egypt Amasis marshalled against this invading host of Persia. But to no purpose: the single and signal defeat his son sustained at Pelusium, the very threshold of the land, gave to Cambyses the whole country. From that day to this Power has continued the Northward course it had then commenced; and, consequently, there has been no resurrection for the first-born of civilization, the inventress of Letters, and of Political Organization, and of so many of the arts that better man’s Estate, and embellish life. This, to some extent, hides from our view the fact that we are, greatly, what we are at this day, because Egypt had been what she was in the prehistoric times. At Sais and Bubastis were held two of the great annual religious Assemblies and Festivals of the Egyptians. It naturally occurs to us to ask, why at these two cities of the Delta, and not at primæval This, royal Memphis, or imperial Thebes? The answer that first occurs is that these two then modern Capitals may have been selected in order to bring them into repute, and invest them with an importance, they would not otherwise have possessed. This supposition, however, is, to some extent, negatived by the known antiquity, at all events, of Bubastis, and by the remark of Herodotus that the Egyptians were the first of mankind to institute these religious gatherings and fêtes: we are, therefore, precluded from imagining that their chief celebrations of this kind dated only from the Bubastic or Saite Dynasties. We can also see that the people of Upper Egypt, all of whom dwelt on the actual bank of the river, would be more disposed to come down the stream to the Delta, than the people of the broad Delta would be to ascend the stream to This or Thebes.