of castles and strong places, seem to have been the same as those of the order of the Assassins. The accordance, likewise, of the white dress and red fillets of the Assassins, with the white mantle and red cross of the Templars, is certainly remarkably striking. As the Templars, in many respects, trod in the footsteps of the Assassins, so also did the Jesuits, whose exertions for the aggrandisement of their order, and its preservation, if not by political power, at least by secret connexions and influence, agree entirely with the similar policy of the Assassins after the fall of Alamut. The Assassins were, themselves, as we have seen, a branch of the Ismailites, the proper Illuminati of the east. The institution of their lodge at Cairo; the various grades of initiation; the appellations of master, companions, and novices; the public and the secret doctrine; the oath of unconditional obedience to unknown superiors, to serve the ends of the order; all agree completely with what we have heard and read, in our own days, concerning secret revolutionary societies; and they coincide not less in the form or their constitution, than in the common object of declaring all kings and priests superfluous. The ostensible object of this institution was in itself sufficiently laudable, and the exoteric doctrine had merely for its object the extension of knowledge, and the mutual support of the members. The house of science, at Cairo, or the public school of the lodge, was the temple of the sciences, and the model of all academies; the greater number of the members were certainly deceived into good faith by the fair exterior of a beneficent, philanthropical, knowledge-spreading form; they were a kind of Freemasons, whose native country, as we have seen, may really be sought and found in Egypt, if not in the most ancient times, at least in the history of the middle ages. As in the west, revolutionary societies arose from the bosom of the Freemasons, so in the east, did the Assassins spring from the Ismailites.