These great annual Feasts answered several important purposes. They impressed the same religious ideas on all who participated in them; and this contributed much to national, as well as to religious, unity and amalgamation. By their tone also of gladness, festivity, and licence they temporarily lightened the yoke of an austere religion, and provided a recognized vent for some very natural, and not unhealthy, impulses of our common humanity. Just what the Saturnalia were to the ancient Roman, and what the Carnival is to his modern representative, the Feast of Bubastis was to the old Egyptian for some thousands of years before the name of Rome had been heard on the seven Hills. The reader may form his own opinion on this point by turning to the account of the Festival given by one who four centuries and a half before our era was travelling through Egypt, and who we may be pretty sure himself witnessed what he thus describes. “While those, who are about to keep the Feast, are on the way to Bubastis, this is what they do. The men and women go together; and there is a large number of both sexes in each boat. Some of the women are provided with castanets, and some of the men with pipes, upon which they perform throughout the whole of the voyage. The rest of the men, and of the women, accompany them with singing, and with clapping their hands. When, as they sail along, they have reached any city, having made fast their boat to the bank, some of the women do what has been already mentioned, while of the rest some assail the women of the city with loud cries and scurrilous jibes, others dance, and others stand up, and make immodest exhibitions. They go through these performances at every river-side city. When they have reached Bubastis they keep the feast with unusually large offerings, and there is a greater consumption of grape wine at this feast than in the remainder of the whole of the twelve months. The number of men and women who are brought together on this occasion, for the children are not reckoned, reaches, as the Egyptians themselves say, to 700,000 souls.”