It was the same way, nearly, in Egypt—that prominent historic feature of antiquity. The valley of the Nile was one level, isolated extent of unrivaled fertility—capable of supporting millions at the expense of no very heavy amount of agricultural toil. People necessarily multiplied there, and being of peaceful agrarian disposition, came, in time, to be subservient to the priests and Pharaohs of the land. The civilization of Egypt was a monstrous sort of thing, born of the sun and the sediment of the Nile, like the other monsters of that “Great river.” Relaxed and enervated by the heat of the climate, kept in ignorance, and employed in masses by the despotism of the country, the people became slavish laborers, husbandmen and manufacturers, living content, in a hot inland condition, unfreshened by any breeze of the civilizing sea, worshiping animals first used as hieroglyphical helps to language, and hating the idea of foreign invasion, ever associated in their minds and traditions with the revolution of the nomade shepherd kings. The stupendous architecture of Egypt, like that of Assyria, proved the numerical force, physical slavishness, and mental superstition of that people. Fattened by the _lætas segetes_—the exuberant harvests of the Nile—brute force and beaverism divided the nation between them—excepting what amount of esoteric knowledge the priests and kings made use of to keep the many-headed monster in order. Let us now look at the aspects of Greece—a country, undoubtedly, peopled from the places and races of Central Asia. Greece is an irregular land of hills and valleys, broken by a thousand bays, and clasped, beneficently, in the serpent arms of the Midland Sea. In Greece are no broad levels on which a despot may deploy his horsemen and war-chariots. Marathon, to be sure, is a plateau, looked on by the mountains, and looking on the sea— The mountains look on Marathon, And Marathon looks on the sea—