The Book of Migration.

29

paramount in the land of their birth. On this truth rested the faith of Moses, when he refused the pleasures of sin in the court of Pharaoh.

Allusions to the creation in the 115th chapter, as it is rendered by Mr. Goodwin in a contribution of his to the Zeitschrift, have met our eye since writing the present article. "I (meaning the supreme god Rá) appeared before the sun." "When the circumference of darkness was opened, I was one among you (gods)." "I know how the woman was made from the male."

We must now leave the Book of the Dead, and make but brief reference to the Book of Migration, edited by Dr. Brugsch, who, we may observe, was once Prussian Consul at Cairo, enjoyed the confidence of the Pasha, and wrote an invaluable history of Egypt, at the Pasha's request, directly gathered from the ancient monuments now standing. Dr. Birch, we are aware, considers this Book of Migration to be one of a very extensive mass of writings never yet collected in any one manuscript, but many of them composed on special occasions, and for the use of particular persons. The Sai an Sinsin is a laudatory address to the deceased. It consists of fourteen chapters. The authorship is attributed to Isis, who calls him her brother Osiris, and it was probably written by a priest for his friend or patron during his life-time, while the sepulchre, also, was in course of preparation for the reception of his body. The address was well adapted to be sung by the priests at the burial, as Diodorus Siculus says was the custom. The first four sections may serve as a specimen of funeral eulogy, eminently Pagan in its character, as such compositions frequently are in spirit, even with ourselves.

I. "Beginning of the Book of Migration, composed by Isis for her brother Osiris, to give life to his soul, to revive his body, to renew his divine members in power, to reunite him to his father Rá (the Sun), to make his soul manifest in heaven in the disc of the god Aah (the Moon), that his body may shine bright in the star of Orion, among the progeny of the goddess Nupe (Rhea), that he may perform his transformation, as is just, in the field of the god Seb (Saturn). The divine father, prophet of AmmonRá, king of the gods; prophet of the gods, Harsiesi the justified (deceased blessed), son of a divine father, prophet of Ammon-Rá, king of the gods, Harsisheshonk the justified, infant of the lady priestess of Ammon, Teutneith the blessed. O thou hidden one! hidden where thou hast the praise of every one in Amenti (Orcus,

as Brugsch renders it), who livest in power covered with a precious veil, in purity.

II. "Hail! Osiris *-thou art pure; thy heart is pure; thon art pure before in cleanness; thou art pure behind with the washing of water; thou art pure within by the infusion of nitre (for embalming); there is no member of thine unclean. Thou art pure, Osiris--with that infusion which is of the plains of Hatapha, towards the north of the plains of Sahamu. The goddess Sate and the goddess Savan have purified thee in the eighth hour of the night, (and) in the eighth hour of the day, that thou mayest be Osiris. Thou comest to the tribunal (Hall of Judgment), thou art purified from all evil, and from all abomination. Rock of Truth is thy name.

III. "Hail! Osiris-thou comest to the house of glory in great purity; the goddesses of truth made thee exceedingly pure at the great tribunal. Thou hast a grand cleansing at the tribunal. The god Seb (Saturn) purified thy members at the tribunal. Thou art fair by looking on Rá, and the god Atune (the sun what he sets), his conjunction at the place of darkness. Ammon is where thou art, giving thee breath, and the god Ptah (Vulcan) bending thy limbs. Thou comest to the horizon with Rá; thy soul is received into the baris † with Osiris; thy soul is divine in the house of Seb, and thou art justified for ever.

IV. "Hail! Osiris-thy name remaineth, thy Sahu (mummy) is fresh; thou art not excluded from heaven, (nor) from earth. Thy soul shineth with Rá; thy soul liveth with Ammon (the Theban Jupiter). Thy body is renewed with Osiris; thou goest on migration for ever."

The book closes with impassioned commendations of the deceased to all the gods "in the abodes of glory." Always taking for granted that the piety of the person when living, the enchantments of the priests, the power of amulets, and the merit of funeral ceremonies have done all that is necessary to secure his admission into the glory of heaven, the language of adulation is carried to the utmost. It appears again upon the gravestones. Brugsch found several; he gives translations of the epitaphs in his Gräberwelt, and two of them here follow. The first is probably a fair

*This book may be adopted at the funeral of any other person, by the substitution of another first section, to be descriptive of the person, and his parentage, and by supplying the name after Osiris, which this time is Harsiesi, son of Harsisheshonk, born of the priestess Teutneith.

† Bapic. Herodotus, II. 96, gives this name to a large kind of barge used for conveying burdens on the Nile, and also for similar vessels constructed for state occasions, and for funerals. The same name is given to the barge of Rá, in which the great god is supposed to sail all day in the clear ether.

specimen of many. The deceased bespeaks the good opinion of those who come after him :

"O ye great men, you prophets, you priests, you templesingers, and all you men that come millions of years after me; if ever one of you shall deny my name and exhibit his own, so will god do unto him, by making his memory perish on the earth, but if he praises my name that is on this monument, so shall the god of the dead in like manner cause it to come to pass with him."

The following inscription he copied from a grave in Beni Hassan, where he supposed it had been for about 2,500 years before Christ. After a short historical introduction, in which the deceased enumerates the services he rendered to the neighbourhood where he lived, he proceeds :—

"I have not troubled the son of the poor man, I have not oppressed any widow, I have not disturbed any fisherman, I have not driven away any shepherd; there was no householder whose servant I took for labour; no prisoner languished in my days, no one died of hunger in my time. When there were years of hunger, I had all the fields of my Nomos ploughed, on to the Northern and Southern boundaries. I gave nourishment to its inhabitants and fed them. There was no hungry person in it. I gave the widow equal measure with the married woman. I did not prefer the rich to the poor."

So at last self-esteem and vanity close the tale of life. All peculiarities of age, country, or sect, seem to be lost, swept off the scene by a single gust of pride. Pride, as universal as death, speaks loud as ever from the tomb, and the Egyptian Pharisee proves himself no less earnest than his brethren in Judea to trumpet his own fame precisely in the place and at the time most unfit for the manifestation of vainglory. The common disease of evil needs the application of a remedy, and all the Christian world, exulting in the possession of a clearer revelation of primitive truth, have reason to be thankful that such a remedy has been provided.

ART. II.-1. The Comedies and Tragedies of George Chapman, now first collected, with Illustrative Notes, and a Memoir of the Author. In Three Volumes. London: John Pearson, York Street, Covent Garden. 1873.

2. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the Time of Shakespeare. With Notes. By CHARLES LAMB. New Edition, including the Extracts from the Garrick Plays. London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.

IT is more than strange that a dramatist of the Elizabethan cycle, with an extra-dramatic reputation such as has clung for two centuries and a half to George Chapman's translation of the works of Homer, should have remained until last year among the inedited* authors of the most brilliant and most vital epoch of English literature. If not as worthy of the care of that great editor, the late Mr. Dyce, as were Webster and Ford, Chapman was at least as worthy of good editing as many of those whose works passed through Mr. Dyce's hands; and it is, we repeat, strange that we should have to thank the enterprise of Mr. Pearson, well known for sundry other reprints of old books, for the first collected edition of the plays of a man associated as Chapman was with some of his greatest contemporaries, and still currently before the reading world (indeed, too patently present!) in his noble though somewhat un-Homeric version of Homer. It is now sixty-six years since Charles Lamb recorded an opinion of Chapman, which should, in the nature of things, have long ago borne the fruit of a complete edition of his plays from some other hand; for we doubtless owe much in the way of good editions of Elizabethan work to the impetus which Lamb's Specimens gave to the study and appreciation of that literature. That book of specimens, delightful in itself, consisted, in the days of its first appear

Inedited as to complete dramatic works: isolated plays of Chapman have appeared once and again in Collections; and one of them (Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany) was edited in 1867 by Herr Karl Elze.

Lamb's Estimate of Chapman.

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ance, of extracts gathered almost wholly from scarce old books. But the authors there represented, and still to this day inedited, are quite a small minority; and we certainly have to thank Lamb's admirable taste in selection, and tact in comment, for much that has since been done. The highest critics still hesitate to dissent from Lamb in any important question of Elizabethan literature, and no one valuing his reputation would think of setting about a serious estimate of any one of those dramatists without first instructing himself as to how that most discerning, devoted, and distinguished of dramatic critics thought concerning the particular playwright in question. A note of Lamb's generally has more critical weight in its concentrated truth than is to be found in many pages of ordinary criticism; and although he does not say very much about George Chapman, he says quite enough to justify what we have already stated, and, in the eyes of some writers, a great deal more. He deemed the few pages of selections which he made from Chapman's plays enough to give an idea of that "full and heightened style" which Webster makes characteristic of Chapman; and he records it as his deliberate opinion that "of all English play-writers, Chapman perhaps approaches nearest to Shakespeare in the descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less purely dramatic."

We have been the more careful to give the exact words of Lamb on this subject, because the editor of the reprint on which the present article is based has taken equal care to suppress, apparently for the purposes of an effective and consequential opening to his preliminary dissertation, the very important qualifying phrases which follow the name of Shakespeare. The editor thus makes Lamb guilty of the grand and utterly incredible blunder of ranking Chapman absolutely next to Shakespeare! He says in the first paragraph of his "Memoir:"

"It is the recorded opinion of Charles Lamb that of all the dramatists of that great age, Chapman approached the nearest to Shakespeare."-Chapman's Dramatic Works, Vol. I. p. 5.

* We would willingly regard this as a merely careless blunder, rather than as a gross perversion of the truth as uttored by a truth-speaking man. Our readers will know better how to regard it when they have followed us to the close.