It is a curious fact, that the Egyptian farmer paid the same proportionate rent which is paid by the British farmer of the present day. Rent in Egypt three thousand years ago, was one fifth of the gross produce. The circumstances of Egypt, of course, almost exclude the idea of average land, for any one acre anywhere was likely to be as good as any other acre anywhere else, all being fluviatile alluvium similarly compounded. And all were subject to much the same atmospheric conditions. There could therefore be the same rent for the whole kingdom. But if the land did anywhere, from some exceptional cause, produce more or less, this was met by the system of paying a fifth. With respect to this country, however, we must talk of averages. The average gross produce of average farms is here, I suppose, estimated in money, about eight pounds an acre; and the average rent of such a farm is about thirty-two shillings an acre. Just one fifth. Exactly the proportion that was paid, as rent for the land they occupied, by the tenants of Potiphar, Captain of the Guard, and of Potipherah, Priest of On, Joseph’s father-in-law. The same rent was paid by the occupiers of the farms on the royal demesne to Pharaoh himself. It may also be worth while noticing how similar circumstances produced in those remote times, and produce in our own, similar tastes and manners. Those old Egyptian landlords were not altogether unlike their English representatives. There are traces in them of a family likeness. They were much addicted to field-sports. You see this everywhere in the sculptures and paintings. You find there plenty of scenes of fowling, fishing, and hunting; of running down the gazelle, and spearing the hippopotamus; of coursing and netting hares; and of shooting wild cattle with arrows, and of catching them with the lasso. They had their fish-ponds as well as their game-preserves. They had, too, their game laws. They were fond of dogs and of horses. They kept very good tables. They gave morning and evening parties. They amused themselves with games of skill and chance. They thought a great deal of their ancestors, as well they might, for a thousand years went but for little in the date of the patents of their nobility. They built fine houses, and furnished them handsomely. They paid great attention to horticulture and arboriculture.