pied by the Turk. But the Coptic, though a Christian Church, has for ages been steeped in the deepest darkness. So far back as the time of the Ptolemies, the Monophysite heresy took root there, and its pernicious error is still retained.

In common with the Jew, the Copt observes the rite of circumcision, and abstains from blood and swine's flesh. Like the Romanist, he holds seven sacraments. In the Eucharist, communicates in one kind only, and worships in public in an unknown tongue; for the Coptic, in which the principal portion of the public services are written, is a tongue now unknown to the people. Yet, depressing as such a state of things must be, the frame-work of an Apostolic Church exists. Now, the Church Missionary Society has indubitably begun its work in Egypt at the right end. If you want to light your fire, set the candle under the dry sticks first-these will set the green wood in a blaze. So the mission has not begun by attempting to convert the Mahometan, but it is kindling the dry sticks amongst the Copts. Should this succeed, the Copt will in time become an enkindling body amongst the Moslems, till the flame may spread from Egypt to Abyssinia, and the longtriumphant crescent set before the cross. Then shall the old strongholds of Pagan darkness reflect the rising beams of Gospel truth, and many a mystic monument of bygone times-a Luxor or a Karnac-majestic, though in ruins matchless, albeit in decayrise from the dust of ages, uprear its vast proportions, till within the consecrated walls, where once his forefathers bowed down in ignorance, the Egyptian kneels before the living God. Do not think anticipations such as these are visionary-mere creations of the brain. If God be true, GREAT things are in store for Egypt. The day-star of her prophetic destiny beams brightly in the distant future, for the sacred oracles of truth foretell her day is coming; and in that day we read_

"And Jehovah shall be known to Egypt, And the Egyptians shall know Jehovah in that day;

And they shall serve him with sacrifice and oblation,

And they shall vow a vow unto Jehovah, and shall perform it.

"And Jehovah shall smite Egypt, smiting and healing her;

And they shall turn unto Jehovah, and he shall be entreated by them, and will heal them.

In that day there shall be a highway from Egypt to Assyria;

And the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria; And the Egyptian shall worship with the Assyrian.

In that day Israel shall be reckoned a third,

Together with Egypt and Assyria;
A blessing in the midst of the earth:
Whom Jehovah, God of Hosts, hath
blessed, saying:

Blessed be my people, Egypt;
And Assyria, the work of my hands;
And Israel, my inheritance."

ISAIAH, xix. 18-25.-Lowth's Translation.

But the Cairo mission has not only begun at the right end, but it has set to work in the right way. The Sacred Scriptures are not merely placed in the hands of the students, and the learner left to cull his rule of faith from out its pages, as best he may, but it has accompanied the Scripture with the authoritative teaching of the apostolic Church of England. The Bible and the prayer-book are not disunited in the schools. The "Ethiopian" does not read without a "Philip," nor the Egyptian without a guide. This is as it should be, and we can bid the mission "God speed." The labours of the missionaries have been directed to two main objects: the one, the establishment of a small theological seminary, called the Coptic Institution-the other, that of

a male and female school for elementary instruction.

The institution is designed for Coptic youths destined for the ministry, and has met with the cordial approbation of the Patriarch, who frequently inspects it, and lately received three of the students into deacons' orders.

At the time of my visit the students appeared to have made considerable proficiency in the English language, and were tolerably well versed in the formularies and ritual of the Church of England. I have seldom been more gratified than I was at witnessing, on the Sunday following, the part they all took in the public worship, responding through the service in a manner that it were well if our congregations at home would imitate, who seem to think the parish clerk is paid that they may sit at ease, and pray by

proxy.

Of the elementary, the girls' school interested me especially. This school was under the immediate direction of the indefatigable Mrs. Lieder, and her prime minister (in petticoats, I was about to say, but modesty blushes, whilst truth substitutes breeches), Omm Sulieman, a young Syrian woman. This female school caused, at its establishment, no small stir amongst the Cairo folk. Educate women!such an innovation had never been heard of since the days of the prophet. An Egyptian lady who could read or write, was a phenomenon unthought of in the year of grace, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five. The scheme was a chimera-all balash! Mrs. Lieder, no way daunted, commenced visiting the hareems. At first the fair inmates condescended to beguile the tedious hours by gaining an insight into the mysteries of ornamental needle-work, and such like female nic-knackery. Then the itch for novelty extended from the fingers to the tongue, and they begged for lessons in French or Italian. Mrs. Lieder gradually be

came in great repute, and the poor missionary's wife has been appointed fifth officer in the pasha's household (the nurse, by the way, is first), and created a Turkish Bey! Meanwhile the female school was opened, pupils flocked in, and pleasant was the sight which greeted my eyes as I walked into the school-room; and a crowd of little miniature women, eyes khol'd and fingers stained with hennah, presented themselves to my view. I reverenced the lady who had effected such great things, and bowed politely to her wellbreeched assistant, around whom had gathered a cluster of little beings, chaunting Watt's First Catechism (of course in Arabic) to one of the plaintive ditties of their native land. The Bible was in the hands of those who could read; the Church Catechism was not absent; and writing and cipher ing was going on at a great rate at the other end of the apartment-a grim-looking old Moslem superintend ed the same. In honour of the visitor, the troop was forthwith put through their evolutions. I laid violent hands on various little copy-books, reed pens inclusive; and though I do not know three letters of the Arabic alphabet. I will back my little Coptic copy-books, for cleanliness and execution, against the European ditto of any parochial school in England or Ireland. But every rose has its thorn; and those little white and black roses in Mrs. Lieder's nursery bore a very vexatious kind of thorn, which sadly pricked the good lady. From four years old to nine, she informed me, "my pupils get on amazingly, but from nine years out I can do them little good.”

"Why so, madam?" inquired I. "Because, sir," she replied "at nine years old they reach the fatal age; they then are in general be many wedded at thirteen; but woe betide the damsel that passes her sixteenth year unmated—she is looked on as an irrevocable old maid. Now," added Mrs. Lieder, "I never could get good of A CLASS OF BRIDES."

HERE is something new and vigorous -something Irish also, without wolfdogs, druids, or Ollamh Fodhlas; a bold picture of Ireland Protestantized, and, for once at least, the protectress of freedom and the deliverer of Great Britain from foreign rule. For unquestionably it was the Protestant power of Ulster, at the period recalled by these pages, which turned the scale, and confirmed the English revolution-an event happy for England, and proud for Ulster, but we cannot add happyhistory, we fear, will say hapless and humiliating for the rest of Ireland. If the people of Ulster at that time could have foreseen that their descendants, a century and a-half after, would still remain dissevered from the rest of their own countrymen-still a garrison, but a garrison for an England no longer Protestant; that without having gained the name of Britons, they would still have failed to make that of Irishmen respected; that the Roman religion would be again freely recognised in England, and authoritatively encouraged throughout this country, whither they had come to put it down-they would probably not have assumed so resolutely an office so thankless. Protestantism probably would at this day be established in the hearts and minds of a free people, bold to look the defects of their ecelesiastical system in the face, because not afraid nor ashamed of their social position in their own country. But it

was otherwise decreed. Šie vos non tobis has been the lesson read by time to all who support external influences in their own lands. Still, however he may be occasionally stung by the sense of being in a false position, no Protestant Irishman can look back on the heroism of these saviours of British freedom, and founders of British prosperity, who decided the fate of the Revolution of 1688, in Ulster, without pride, and a feeling of hereditary importance in the state.

It is a bold step in a candid novelist to carry his readers to the siege of Derry. The horse-flesh and vermin eaten by the apprentices, were not more revolting viands than poor readers have had to swallow under continual obsessions of parsons, parishclerks, and schoolmasters

"Stern, rugged Graham, thy rigid lore,

With patience many a year we bore-"

We compare an author who comes to our relief, with a cargo of knowledge and candour, to Kirk with his brigs breaking the boom above Culmore.

This portion of Ulster witnessed a wondrous variety of incident, between the return of Red Hugh O'Donnell and the day when the siege of Derry was raised. In one century, it passed through a transition equal to the changes of six elsewhere. Little more than fifty years before this strife of cultivated minds, and of hands trained to the appliances of modern warfare, contending for the establishment or overthrow of principles which should rule one-half of the civilized world, took place on these banks of the Foyle, this country had been the theatre of wars almost as simple in their strategy, and as circumscribed in their objects, as the tribe battles of the Red Indians. Topographers, for want of better features, planted that quarter of their charts over with galloglasses

"As g'ographers, on Afric map,
With alligators fill a gap,

And, over undiscovered downs,

Plant elephants, for want of towns-"

-Mac Sweenys and O'Boyles, men of big limbs, and fierce, cruel countenances, clad in long coats of mail, with broad-axes in their hands, and iron scull-caps, barefooted, seated on mountain-tops, themselves drawn as big as the mountains. Such were the denizens of the place, before Dockwra sailed up the Foyle, and astonished O'Don

nell, by casting up his sloping green mounds, and his deep, impassable trenches, commanded on every side by the mutually-protecting faces and flanks of works disposed into the novel and embarrassing adjustment of bastions and ravelines. A little while after, and O'Donnell lies entombed in Valladolid the O'Neills, in St. Peter's on the Mount-Mac Guire at Genoa; the crowning-stones have been tumbled down at Tullaghogue and Kilmacrennan; the corrachs have disappeared from the Foyle, and on its placid bosom float high-rigged long-ships from across the sea, full of rich goods, and cannon, and the strength of gunpowder-while, on shore, woods are felling, iron smelting, cloth weaving, and

"Jack the jolly ploughboy is ploughing on his land Cries Yeoh! unto his horses, and boldly bids them stand."

The maps and picture-charts of the Plantation, preserved at Lambeth, give surprisingly exact and interesting. representations of the houses and castles of the new settlers. From the manor-house, with its many-gabled centre and wings-its flanking, conicaltopped turrets, court-yard, and stately entrance gate, and the leaseholder's farm-house of timber frame-work, wrought into compartments and patterns, with its roof of shining, freshsplit shingle, down to the cottager's hut of mud-walls and thatch, every building is represented with perfect accuracy. Among the houses of the cottagers one may remark, as contradistinguished from the rectangular, high gabled, one-story house of the colonist, the circular, flat-roofed hut of the native Irishman. These latter habitations, with their cylindrical form and chimney (where they have a chimney) rising at one side, bear a ludicrous resemblance to the wooden milk

ing-vessel in common use. But many of the better class of houses exhibit great stateliness of design, and, to our mediæval revivors, would be excellent patterns for pseudo antique country residences-a class of abodes to which we may say, in passing, that we entertain the strongest objection, as out of place, and unsuitable to the times we live in.

Our author introduces us to the principal characters of his tale, in a plantation-castle of this description, near Loch Esk, a charming lake at the

head of the bay of Donegal, and near the southern adit of the Pass of Bar. nesmore, a kind of Tyrconnellian Kyber, traversing the mountains which separate the basin of the Erne from that of the Foyle. Barnesmore signifies the "Great Gap."

"By this gap," says our author, "the chain of mountains is broken; it seems exactly as if a cut had been designedly made in their continuity. A perfectly in breadth, and nearly two in length, level space, of about a quarter of a mile lies between the rugged fronts of the dissevered mountains, that rise on either side in inaccessible grandeur, with bare and naked cliffs, between which chasms have been formed by the mountain-torrents; a little stream, glassy in its surface and lazy in its course, winds slowly along the level; the inclination of the ground seems scarcely enough to give its waters an impetus either way. An excellent mail-coach road has been of late years made through the pass, and as you bowl along with the most perfect ease over the smooth surface of the highway, you can scarcely believe that if it were not for that pass, for a line of country extending to more than twenty miles on either side, there would be no mode of effecting a passage across the natural barrier of mountain, and moor, and morass, which nature has formed. It is only when you look up to the vast piles of mountain that rise on either side until the eye is fatigued with carrying on its gaze from height to height, that you can form some idea of the magnitude of the barrier which is thus conveniently divided."

We will now present our readers with a prospect of the Plantation Cas tle we have spoken of, the residence of Sir Robert Oakley, a worthy gentleman-uniting, in family connexions as well as in manners and feeling, the characters of the old Irish chieftain on the one hand, and of the loyal, English-sprung settler on the other; uniting, also, to Protestant independence, a respect for the amiable side of Romanism, and, at the commencement of our author's tale, a loyal subject of King James. The castle is so well described, that we should almost say our author had had access to the picture-charts of Lambeth, or to the transcripts of them at Mountjoy. Mount joy-every time we write the word, we experience the indignant sense of mismanagement, neglect, and discountenance, shown towards us by

those who suppressed that department of our ordnance survey, and who, but for absolute fear of provoking national resistance, would long since have carried into effect their threat of removing these national records to Southampton. Mountjoy-it makes us think of Petrie and his wasted days and nights, and services forgotten; while his country calls for his aid in successive departments which they fill with fools. But, to come back to Esk Castle:

"On the flat table of an eminence on the southern side of the river Esk, not far from the point where it emerges from the lake, was placed a pile of buildings, thrown into the form of a hollow quadrangle, the regularity, however, of the shape being more than compensated for by the irregularity of the style of architecture of which different portions were constructed. The quadranglebuilt, it is to be observed, but on three sides, the river running in a deep channel forming the fourth-was, in fact, intended to include within the compass of one enclosure, all the necessary buildings of a gentleman's residence and farm. The exterior wall of the mansion was therefore of considerable extent, but of height varying not a little in its different parts. The southern front, or what might be termed the front of the house, consisted of a low and whitish building, two stories high, with plain but very narrow windows; and broken in two places by very plain arched gates, which formed the opening to the quadrangle behind. The two wings, as we may term the eastern and western sides, rose to a considerable height above this; both these wings were surmounted by turrets, the eastern, next the lake, rising much higher than the other. Indeed, the entire eastern portion assumed the form of a castellated fortress, battlements and turrets rose high over it, frowning above the rest of the building; and the windows were surrounded with mullions of cut stone. In the south-eastern angle of the building, a military arch led to the door of the house. This portion of the building was in reality built in the proportions of a castle, and as the opposite wing had also its turrets, and the slate roof of the southern front was concealed by a curtain wall, the whole pile of building assumed the appearance of what it really was-a military fortress of considerable strength; while seen from a little distance, rising in the middle of the spacious woods that surrounded them, and standing out in bold

relief to the dark hill that rose immediately behind, the light gray battlements and towers of the eastern wing impressed the stranger with the idea of one of the baronial strongholds of feudal times. With a more particular description of the stronghold we may have hereafter to trouble our readers: suffice it at present to say that, as originally built, it was one of the few erections in the district which literally fulfilled the obligation upon every undertaker of a knight's fee to build upon his estate a fortified castle."

Here we are made acquainted with Ellen Oakley and William Spencer, the amiable couple on whose fortunes the love-department of the story turns. There is not much in the character of either to distinguish them from the hero and heroine of any other novel: the captain is a gentleman-a man of honour, bravery, and fidelity, and a strong Protestant; Miss Oakley, a pure-minded, ingenuous young girl, with a vein of Catholic and Irish sentiment, derived from her mother. These associations throw us a good deal into Romish society in the progress of the tale; and we cannot but commend the candid spirit with which whatever is most amiable among these good people is put forward by a writer whose own sympathies are manifestly of the strongest Protestant complexion. Native Irish manners are also present ed to us with an equally frank and honest disposition to do them justice; but the O'Donnell, who plays the part of Irish chieftain in "the Gap of Barnesmore," is not a Fergus Mac Ivor. Our author, we think, has misconceived the manners likely to be acquired by an Irish exile of good birth in the Spanish service at that time. Whatever might be the natural tendency to vanity or boastfulness in the man himself, he would have learned, in a Spanish regiment of the seventeenth century, a sound knowledge of military tactics, and a grave and dignified de. meanour. The O'Donnell of "the gap" possesses, however, the traditionary hospitality and sense of honour which have never ceased, in all the vicissitudes of their race, to characterise the Irish gentleman; but the writer's sympathies are evidently on the Saxon side, and his Irishman plays a part as subordinate in the tale as, taking a broad view of the events of that time, the Irish race did in the affairs of Eu