e found,
could we evoke a Carthaginian ledger, we would gladly purchase it at the
cost of one or two Fathers of the Church. It would inform us of many
things very pleasant and profitable to be known. Among others it would
probably give some inkling of the stages and inns upon the great road
which led from the eastern flank of Mount Atlas to Berenice, on the Red
Sea. This road was in ill odour with the Egyptians, who, like all close
boroughs, dreaded the approach of strangers and innovations. And the
Carthaginian caravans came much too near the gold-mines of the Pharaohs
to be at all pleasant to those potentates: it was

--"much I wis
To the annoyance of King Amasis."

But it is bootless to pine after knowledge irretrievably buried in
oblivion. Otherwise we might fairly have wished to have stood beside
King Nebuchadnezzar when he so unadvisedly uttered that proud vaunt which
ended in his being condemned to a long course of vegetable diet. For
doubtless he gazed upon at least four main roads which entered the walls
of Babylon from four opposite quarters:--

"From Arachosia, from Candaor east,
And Margiana, to the Hyrcanian cliffs
Of Caucasus, and dark Iberian dales:
From Atropatia and the neighbouring plains
Of Adiabene, Media, and the south
Of Susiana, to Balsara's havens."

We pass over as a mad imperial whim Caligula's road from Baiae to
Puteoli, partly because it was a costly and useless waste of money and
labour, and partly because that emperor had an awkward trick of flinging
to the fishes all persons who did not admire his road. It was a bad
imitation of a bad model--the road with which Xerxes bridled the
"indignant Hellespont." Both the Hellespontine and the Baian road
perished in the lifetime of their founders; while the Simplon still
attests the more sublime and practical genius of Napoleon. We should
have also greatly liked to watch the Cimbri and Ambrones at their work of
piling up those gigantic earth-mounds in Britain and in Gaul, which,
under the appellation of Devil's-dykes, are still visible and, as
monuments of patient labour and toil, second only to the construction of
the Pyramids.

The physiognomy of races is reflected in their public works. The warm
climate of Egypt was not the only cause for the long paven corridors
which ran underground from temple to temple, and conducted the Deputies
of the Nomes to their sacerdotal meeting in the great Laby