The rapid rise of the power of the Moslems, and the religious discord which prevailed in Egypt, levelled a death-blow at the grandeur of this powerful city, whose prosperity had been unchecked from the time of its foundation;--upwards of nine hundred and seventy years. Amrou, the lieutenant of Omar, king of the Saracens, having entered Egypt, and taken Pelusium, Babylon, and Memphis, laid siege to Alexandria, and after fourteen months carried the city by assault, and all Egypt submitted to the yoke of the Caliphs. The standard of Mahomet was planted on the walls of Alexandria A.D. 640. Abulfaragius, in his history of the tenth dynasty, gives the following account of this catastrophe:--John Philoponus, a famous Peripatetic philosopher, being at Alexandria when the city was taken by the Saracens, was admitted to familiar intercourse with Amrou, the Arabian general, and presumed to solicit a gift, inestimable in his opinion but contemptible in that of the barbarians, and this was the royal library. Amrou was inclined to gratify his wish, but his rigid integrity scrupled to alienate the least object without the Caliph's consent. He accordingly wrote to Omar, whose well-known answer was dictated by the ignorance of a fanatic. Amrou wrote thus to his master, "I have taken the great city of the West. It is impossible for me to enumerate the variety of its riches and beauty; I shall content myself with observing, that it contains 4000 palaces, 4000 baths, 400 theatres or places of amusement, 12,000 shops for the sale of vegetable food, and 40,000 tributary Jews." He then related what Philoponus had requested of him. "If these writings of the Greeks," answered the bigoted barbarian, his master, "agree with the Koran, or book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed." This valuable repository, therefore, was devoted to the flames, and during six months the volumes of which it consisted supplied fuel to the four thousand baths, which gave health and cleanliness to the city. "No complaint," says a celebrated moralist (Johnson), "is more frequently repeated among the learned, than that of the waste made by time among the labours of antiquity. Of those who once filled the civilised world with their renown nothing is now left but their names, which are left only to raise desires that never can be satisfied, and sorrow which never can be comforted. Had all the writings of the ancients been faithfully delivered down from age to age, had the _Alexandrian library_ been spared, and the Palatine repositories remained unimpaired, how much might we have known of which we are now doomed to be ignorant, how many laborious inquiries and dark conjectures, how many collations of broken hints and mutilated passages might have been spared! We should have known the successions of princes, the revolutions of empires, the actions of the great, and opinions of the wise, the laws and