Neither did it fall because the civilization of Egypt had at last, after so many thousands of years, worn itself out. There were no symptoms of the life within it having become enfeebled through time, or from anything time had brought. The propylons, the enclosing wall, the monolithic granite shrine, the mighty roof-stones, the sculptures of the Ptolemaic Temple of Edfou, and the massive monolithic granite shaft of the pillar raised at Alexandria to the honour of Diocletian, prove that, down to the last days of this long period, they could handle, as deftly as ever their forefathers had done, masses of stone so ponderous that to look at them shortens our breathing; and which they sculptured and polished in the same way as of old. The priests who explained the sculptures of Thebes to Germanicus were lineally the descendants of those who had formed the aristocracy, and had supplied the magistracy, and the governing body of Thebes, and of Egypt, under Rameses the Great, under Cheops, under Menes. Nor can we suppose that any such amount of moral, or intellectual degeneration had been brought about, as might not easily have been recovered by the restitution of the old conditions of the country. The Egyptian system, which left so little to the individual, seemed to provide, just as they had taken care that their great buildings should, against whatever contingencies might arise. It still had in itself the capacity for rising, Phœnix-like, into new life. So would it have been had Egypt been able to maintain its old insulation. The day, however, for that had gone by. It now formed a part of the general system of the civilized world; and, looking at it in its relations to other people, we discover in it elements of weakness, immorality, and effeteness; and these precisely it was that, under the then existing circumstances, caused its fall. The state of things that had arisen could have had no existence during the four thousand years, or more, it had passed through. What that state of things was, and how it acted, is what we have now to make out distinctly to our thoughts.