e Red Sea, a proceeding which ensures his entire
ignorance of all sublunary matters, and his consequent incapacity for
his high and responsible office, unless he chance to be a man of very
uncommon talents. Like the patriarch of Constantinople, he is usually a
puppet in the hands of a cabal who make use of him for their own
interested purposes, and when they have got him into a scrape leave him
to get out of it as he can. He is called the Patriarch of Alexandria,
but for many years his residence has been at Cairo, where he has a large
dreary palace. He is surrounded by priests and acolytes; but when I was
last at Cairo there was but one remaining Coptic scribe among them, whom
I engaged to copy out the Gospel of St Mark from an ancient MS. in the
patriarchal library: however, after a very long delay he copied out St.
Matthew's Gospel by mistake, and I was told that there was no other
person whose profession it was to copy Coptic writings.

The patriarch has twelve bishops under him, whose residences are at
Nagade, Abou Girge, Aboutig, Siout, Girge, Manfalout, Maharaka, the
Fioum, Atfeh, Behenese, and Jerusalem: he also consecrates the Abouna or
Patriarch of Abyssinia, who by a specific law must not be a native of
that country, and who has not the privilege of naming his successor or
consecrating archbishops or bishops, although in other respects his
authority in religious matters is supreme. The Patriarch of Abyssinia
usually ordains two or three thousand priests at once on his first
arrival in that country, and the unfitness of the individual appointed
to this high office has sometimes caused much scandal. This has arisen
from the difficulty there has often been in getting a respectable person
to accept the office, as it involves perpetual banishment from Egypt,
and a residence among a people whose partiality to raw meat and other
peculiar customs are held as abominations by the Egyptians.

The usual trade and occupation of the Copts is that of kateb, scribe, or
accountant; they seem to have a natural talent for arithmetic. They
appear to be more afflicted with ophthalmia than the Mohamedans, perhaps
because they drink wine and spirits, which the others do not.

The person of the greatest consequence among the Copts was Basileos Bey,
the Pasha's confidential secretary and minister of finance. This
gentleman was good enough to lend me a magnificent dahabieh or boat of
the largest size, which I used for many months. It