“Jezebel stimmied her eyes.” So the Septuagint version has it. This translation was made at Alexandria by Jews. Their own wives and daughters had made them familiar with the practice, and with the word technically used to express it; and they very naturally and properly adopted the technical term in their translation. They again used it in the parallel passage of Ezekiel. The rendering in our English Bible of this incident in Jezebel’s last toilet is misleading. It makes her “paint her face.” This suggests the rouge-pot and the cheeks, instead of the kohl-stick and the eyes. On the monuments we see that the ladies of old Egypt had the same practice. In the streets of the Cairo of to-day you find that the ladies of modern Egypt have retained it. The object of the practice is two-fold—to give prominency to the eyes, the most expressive feature, and to make the complexion of the face, by the effect of the contrast with the thus deepened darkness of the eyes, appear somewhat fairer. The history of Joseph, I might almost call it the Josephead, the more distinctly to indicate my meaning, wears very much the appearance of an episode in a great national epic cycle, which had been handed down from the legendary age, and which must have been, as is still the case with oriental romances, in form prose, though in style and spirit full of dramatic force and poetry. I can imagine the men and children sitting at the tent-door, and the women within, to hear its recital. Just such histories are now recited daily throughout the East. While their incidents interest and entrance the imagination, they teach history, morality, and religion. How pleasingly do the high moral aims of this story of Joseph, so simple and natural, so true and profound, contrast with the frivolous, mawkish, false, sensational sentimentality of the modern novel! Its ideas, style, form, and colouring supply almost a collective illustration of the obstinate persistency we are noticing in everything oriental. With the exception of slavery, which, in deference to the ideas and feelings of the Christian world, has lately been abolished by law in Egypt—though I understand the law is very imperfectly observed—this history may be read to-day just as if its object were to give a picture of the thought, feelings, and practices of modern Egyptian life. If its dialogue, and all its minutiæ of detail, were heard for the first time at the date of the Exodus, it would still possess a very remote antiquity. It is, however, curious that we have every particular of Joseph’s adventure with Potiphar’s wife in the story of the ‘Two Brothers,’ the only Egyptian romance we have recovered, and the papyrus manuscript of which is somewhat older, at least, than the Exodus; for it was written, or edited, by Kagabu, one of the nine literati attached to the household of Rameses the Great, for the instruction of the crown-prince, Meneptha, in whose reign the Exodus took place.