arts of engraving, carving, &c. Nor did it seem to
cost Aaron any trouble to make a cast of Apis in the Wilderness for the
Israelites' amusement, 1491 years before Christ; while the dog Anubis
was probably another figure with which Moses was not unacquainted, and
that was certainly composite: a cynopephalus I believe.]

A modern traveller has however, with much ingenuity of conjecture, given
us an excellent reason why the Sphinx was peculiar to Egypt, as the
Nile was observed to overflow when the sun was in those signs of the
Zodiack:

The lion virgin Sphinx, which shows
What time the rich Nile overflows.

And sure I think, as people lived longer then than they do now; as Moses
was contemporary with Cecrops, so that monarchy and a settled form of
government had begun to obtain footing in Greece, and apparently
migrated a little westward even then; that this column might have
employed the artists of those days, without any such exceeding stretch
of probability as our modern Aristotelians study to make out, from their
zeal to establish his doctrine of the world's eternity. While, if
conjecture were once as liberally permitted to believers as it is
generously afforded to scepticks, I know not whether a hint concerning
Sphinx's original might not be deduced from old Israel's last blessing
to his sons; _The lion of Judah_, with the _head of a virgin_, in whose
offspring that lion was one day to sink and be lost, except his hinder
parts; might naturally enough grow into a favourite emblem among the
inhabitants of a nation who owed their existence to one of the family;
and who would be still more inclined to commemorate the mystical
blessing, if they observed the fructifying inundation to happen
regularly, as Mr. Savary says, when the Sun left Leo for Virgo.

The broken pillar has however carried me too far perhaps, though every
day passed in the Pope's Musaeum confirms my belief, nay certainty, that
they did mingle the veneration of Joseph with that of their own gods:
The bushel or measure of corn on the Egyptian Jupiter's head is a proof
of it, and the name _Serapis_, a further corroboration: the dream which
he explained for Pharaoh relative to the event that fixed his favour in
that country, was expressed by _cattle_; and _for apis_, the _ox's
head_, was perfectly applicable to him for every reason.

But we will quit mythology for the Corso. This is the first town in
Italy I have arrived at yet, where the ladi