ciplined nations
of Palestine, and they fell back to their desert, which they found
intolerable. Like some of the Bedouin tribes of modern times in the
rocky wastes contiguous to the Red Sea, they were unable to resist the
temptations of the Egyptian cities; they left their free but distressful
wilderness, and became Fellaheen. The Pharaohs, however, made them pay
for their ready means of sustenance, as Mehemet Ali has made the Arabs
of our days who have quitted the desert to eat the harvests of the Nile.
They enslaved them, and worked them as beasts of burden. But this was
not to be long borne by a race whose chiefs in the early ages had
been favoured by Jehovah; the patriarch Emirs, who, issuing from
the Caucasian cradle of the great races, spread over the plains of
Mesopotamia, and disseminated their illustrious seed throughout the
Arabian wilderness. Their fiery imaginations brooded over the great
traditions of their tribe, and at length there arose among them one of
those men whose existence is an epoch in the history of human nature:
a great creative spirit and organising mind, in whom the faculties
of conception and of action are equally balanced and possessed in the
highest degree; in every respect a man of the complete Caucasian model,
and almost as perfect as Adam when he was just finished and placed in
Eden.

But Jehovah recognised in Moses a human instrument too rare merely to
be entrusted with the redemption of an Arabian tribe from a state of
Fellaheen to Bedouin existence. And, therefore, he was summoned to be
the organ of an eternal revelation of the Divine will, and his tribe
were appointed to be the hereditary ministers of that mighty and
mysterious dispensation.

It is to be noted, although the Omnipotent Creator might have found, had
it pleased him, in the humblest of his creations, an efficient agent
for his purpose, however difficult and sublime, that Divine Majesty has
never thought fit to communicate except with human beings of the very
highest powers. They are always men who have manifested an extraordinary
aptitude for great affairs, and the possession of a fervent and
commanding genius. They are great legislators, or great warriors, or
great poets, or orators of the most vehement and impassioned spirit.
Such were Moses, Joshua, the heroic youth of Hebron, and his magnificent
son; such, too, was Isaiah, a man, humanly speaking, not inferior to
Demosthenes, and struggling for a similar and as