Egypt, although even then shorn of a portion of her ancient glories, and sinking by slow steps into a Roman province, was still the garden, and the glory of the universe. It was a glorious sight to look upon those almost boundless plains, or on those wondrous valleys, bounded on either hand by mountains then clothed with artificial verdure even to their summits, in the early summer, when the tender herbage of the young grain had spread them with an interminable carpet of the brightest green, or in the genial noon of autumn, when the tall wheat and bearded barley undulated in every breeze, a sea of golden fertility. It was a yet more wondrous sight, and savoring of enchantment, to view her thousand cities blazing with the barbaric splendors of the East—her temples far surpassing in strange, awful magnificence, in gloomy mysticism, and terrific splendor, the simpler and more classic shrines of Greece—her groves of palm, her thickets of acacia, her canals embowered with the broad leaves and lovely blossoms of the azure lotus, her coppices blushing with the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate, or rich with the bursting fig—her palaces, her libraries, her quays, trodden by the mariners of every known realm, her galleys, that had braved the tempests of the “ocean stream,” and visited, in their adventurous roamings, the dark and stormy Cassiterides, or yet more wonderful, had been favored with glimpses of those “Edens of the western wave,” those islands of the blest, in whose remote and uncertain shores the imaginative poets of the Greeks had placed the residence of the departed good. It was about the period above mentioned, that a war-galley of that construction which had been recently adopted by the Romans, in preference to the lofty and cumbrous castles of the deep, only used for purposes of display and pleasure, was to be seen beating in for the Egyptian shore. She was a noble trireme, and it would seem that the builder had exerted his utmost skill to render her not only seaworthy, and formidable as a ship of war, but rich even to magnificence in her decorations.