Ptah, the primordial god, is said, in the great Harris Papyrus, to have moulded man, created the gods, made the sky and formed the Earth, revolving in space. (Great Harris Papyrus, translated in the Records of the Past.)

Professor the Rev. G. Lieblein, in a paper read before the Congrès Provincial des Orientalistes at St. Etienne, and printed in the Report of its Proceedings, quotes from a hieratic inscription of the Pyramid period the following passage: "The Earth navigates the celestial ocean in like manner with the sun and the stars."

ENGLAND TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

A REVIEW BY PROF. PAUL CHAIX, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND.

Through England on a side saddle in the time of William and Mary, being the Diary of Celia Fiennes. Edited by the Hon. Mrs. Griffiths. Field and Tuer, Leadenhall, London, 1889. (Privately Printed.)

The writer of this Diary was the daughter of Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes, a Parliamentarian officer, and was sister of the third viscount Saye and Sele. She lets us know that "her Journeys were begun to regain her health by variety and change of air and exercise, and wrote down her remarks not likely to fall into the hands of any but her near relations, there needs not much to be said to Excuse or recommend it, being well aware of its deffect in all, so they will not expect politeness in this book, only insisting on the opportunity of having many imitators among such gentlemen who are reckoned apt to perform the duties of magistrates and members of parliament in the gen' service of their country, and would not be the worse for having studied their own. country as she has done for diversion."

The editor, the Hon. Mrs. Emily W. Griffiths, herself a kinswoman of Celia Fiennes, being a daughter of the present 13th baron Saye and Sele, says in an Introduction that she copied the MS. verbatim because she believes any alteration would spoil its quaint originality.

We are indeed inclined to ascribe to the writer worse than mere quaintness. When we bear in mind that she was a contemporary of Madame de Sévigné, we are sorry to acknowledge that the fair sex in England was a step behind that of France, a defect amply redeemed in our present time.

There is but one date mentioned in Celia Fiennes' MS., namely, 1697. Another clue to its chronology is the description of Queen Anne's coronation and the frequent mention of William and Mary as sovereigns entitled to the gratefulness of the nation. She speaks of the metropolis as knowing it well, and allows us to guess that her regular residence was Newtontony, eight miles from Salisbury (Wiltshire).

The Diary opens with a description of Sarum or Salsebury, rebuilt after the destruction of Old Sarum by fire, on a low ground irrigated by "a little rivulet of water which makes the streetes not so clean or so easaye to pass in." "The cathedral, notwithstanding its want of a Rising ground to stand on ye steeple is seen many miles off. The top of the Qoire is exactly painted, and it looks as fresh as if but new done though of three hundred yeares' standing.-There is many good monuments there one all free stone for the lord Georg (name untold), his effiges and ladyes att length on a bed in their Robes and ruffs on pillows, and ye four pillars are twisted and over it Angels, figures of birds, beasts, flowers and leaves very fine, there sits Justice wth ye ballance in her hand, one scale laying over the other twisted looks very natural and well, with ye wreathed work all in free stone with their Armes cut about in Escutcheons all about it; the other is a monument for the Duke of

Summerset all in marble, a large bed his Effigee in garment and ruff all in Coullours, his lady the same only she is laid one step above him because she was Daughter of the Dowager of ffrance (Mary Tudor, the widow of Louis XII) and sister to Henry ye 7th (8th) of England by her second husband Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk. There is the effigee in stone off a doctor that starved himself to death attempting to imitate our Saviour to fast 40 dayes-but at 31 dayes end he became sensible of his evil and would have retrieved his life by eating againe, but then by the Just judgment of god could not swallow any thing down his throate."

So much for the author's style, a contemporary of the Princess Palatine, of the Grande Mademoiselle of OrleansMontpensier and of Madame de Sévigné. She takes us hence, a distance of three miles, to Wilton, "a little village only supported by the Earle of Pembrooke while lives there and has a very ffine house with large Courts one within another.--there is a drawing roome with Anti-roome, ye wanscoat is painted with the whole History of the Acadia romance made by S Philip Sidney, brother to ye then Countess of Pembrooke and Composed by him in ye fine woods above ye house." Then follows a minute description of that lordly residence and its outhouses with especial tribute of admiration to the recurrence of the childish trick of aspersing the earl's guests with "showers of rain all about ye rooms," the table, in grottoes and even to the entrance of their bed

room.

The continual recurrence in the description of the inner parts of mansions of the word whainscoting under the old shape of whanscoating puts us in mind of the

German word Wand, a wall, as the possible etymology of the now adopted word. In her prodigious and really confused minuteness of description of railings, courts, outhouses, stables, stairs, hangings, tapestries, yards, closets of all descriptions and carpetting, she names but once a "parlour for smoaking," and but once also the illustrious authors of the numerous collections of fine paintings adorning the mansions she has visited. Sir Godfrey Kneller is mentioned as the author of many portraits of the ladies who had adorned the court of Windsor.

Her description of Bath in the first pages (12) of the Diary gives us a faithful and complete picture of that place of resort, quite as fashionable in 1695 as it is now, but where the bathers had not yet been subjected to the code of Beau Nash. Their manners, then much the same all over Europe, put us in mind of the rather slovenly baths at Louëche. Miss Celia Fiennes was once a witness of much municipal pageantry in the town of Bath, and gives us a full account of the festivals which put a whole population in motion. She is all along partial to descriptions of the watering places, which she calls spaws, spread all over England, many of which have now fallen into neglect and oblivion; she speaks of them as a customer, and fully describes the manner of bathing or drinking those mineral waters. She does full justice to Tunbridge (p. 102), Harragate (Harrowgate) (p. 69), Marsborough (Knaresborough), as well as to Alford (p. II), Horwood in Buckinghamshire (p. 22), Astrop "steel waters," (p. 25), Barnet (p. 99). By a curious contradiction a chapter at the end of her Diary under the head of " Epsome," mentions every place in Surrey ex