All opposition to Napoleon Buonaparte being at an end upon the continent of Europe, men began to inquire what would be the next object of his restless ambition. Would he execute his long meditated designs against the Turkish empire, parcel out Greece in tributary dukedoms, principalities and kingdoms, and make his way again to Egypt, not risking himself and his army a second time upon the seas, but by a safer land journey, conquering as he went? The imbecile policy of the English in Egypt, the state of that country, and the importance of which it might become in the hand of an efficient government, seemed to invite the French emperor to direct his views thitherward, if he understood his real interests as a conqueror. The scene also which had recently been enacted at Paris by the Jews in Sanhedrim assembled, under his command, appeared to have more meaning than was avowed. It was little likely that he should have convened them to answer questions which there was no reason why he should ask; or to lend their sanction to the conscription, which requiring no other sanction than that of his inexorable tyranny, set all laws, principles, and feelings, at defiance. And though doubtless the deputies indulged gratuitously in impious adulation, yet it was apparent that in some of their blasphemies they echoed the pretensions of the adventurer whom they addressed. When in their hall of meeting they placed the Imperial Eagle over the Ark of the Covenant, and blended the cyphers of Napoleon and Josephine with the unutterable name of God; impious as this was, it was only French flattery in Jewish costume. But when they applied to him the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel, when they called him “the Lord’s anointed Cyrus,” ... “the living Image of the Divinity,” ... “the only mortal according to God’s own heart, to whom He had entrusted the fate of nations, because he alone could govern them with wisdom;” ... these things resembled the abominable language of his Bishops and of his own proclamations, too much to escape notice. And when they reminded him that he had subdued the ancient land of the eternal pyramids, the land wherein their ancestors had been held in bondage, that he had appeared on the banks of the once-sacred Jordan, and fought in the valley of Sichem in the plains of[12] Palestine, such language seemed to indicate a project for resettling them in the Holy Land, as connected with his views concerning Egypt. Nay, as he had successively imitated Hannibal, and Alexander, and Charlemagne, just as the chance of circumstances reminded him of each, was it improbable that Mahommed might be the next object of his imitation? that he might breathe in incense till he fancied himself divine; that adulation, and success, and vanity, utterly unchecked as they were, having destroyed all moral feeling and all conscience, should affect his intellect next; and that, from being the Cyrus of the Lord, he would take the hint