inflicted upon his thigh by his own sabre, whilst angrily sabring a ridiculous quadruped which the Egyptian priests had put forward as a god, Cambyses felt quite at his ease so long as he remembered his vast distance from the mighty capital of Media, to the eastward of the Tigris. The scratch, however, inflamed, for his intemperance had saturated his system with combustible matter; the inflammation spread; the pulse ran high: and he began to feel twinges of alarm. At length mortification commenced; but still he trusted to the old prophecy about Ecbatana, when suddenly a horrid discovery was made that the very Syrian village at his own head-quarters was known by the pompous name of Ecbatana. Josephus tells a similar story of some man contemporary Iwith Herod the Great. And we must all remember that case in Shakspere where the first king of the red rose, Henry IV, had long fancied his destiny to be that he should meet his death in Jerusalem; which naturally did not quicken his zeal for becoming a crusader. "All time enough," doubtless he used to say; "no hurry at all, gentlemen!" But at length, finding himself pronounced by the doctor ripe for dying, it became a question whether the prophet were a false prophet, or the doctor an incompetent physician. However, in such a case, it is something to have a collision of opinions—the prophet against the doctor. But, behold, it soon transpired that there was no collision at all. It was the Jerusalem Chamber, occupied by the king as a bedroom, and extant even yet, to which the prophet had alluded. Upon which his majesty reconciled himself at once to the ugly necessity at hand "In that Jerusalem shall Harry die." The last case- -that of oracular establishments turning out to be accomplices of thieves-is one which occurred in Egypt on a scale of some extent, and is noticed by Herodotus. This degradation argued great poverty in the particular temples; and it is not at all improbable that, amongst a hundred Grecian Oracles, some, under a similar temptation, might fall into a similar disgrace: the poverty must often have existed, but without the thieves; and at Delphi constantly the thieves, but without the poverty. Yet now, as regards even this lowest extremity of disgrace, much more as regards the qualified sort of disrepute attending the three minor cases, one brief distinction puts all to rights. The Greeks never confounded the temple and household of officers engaged in the temple service with the dark functions of the presiding god. In Delphi, besides the Great Lady who discharged the life-shaking duties of Pythia, and the priests, with their train of subordinate ministers directly billeted on the temple, there were two orders of men outside, Delphic citizens: the one styled ȧpiσteis, gentlemen of the service; the other doo, a sort of semisanctified members of the temple establishment, wearing a shadowy resemblance to the lay elders of the Presbyterian Kirk, whose duty was probably, inter alia, to attach themselves to persons of corresponding rank in the retinues of the envoys or consulting clients, and doubtless to extract from them, in convivial moments, all the secrets or general information which the temple required for satisfactory answers. If these outside agents of the great temple personally went too far in their intrigues or stratagems of decoy, the disgrace no more recoiled on the god than, in modern times, the vices or crimes of a priest can affect the pure ritual sanctity of the sacrament he dispenses. Meantime, through these outside ministers-though unaffected by their follies or errors as trepanners—the Oracle of Delphi drew that vast and comprehensive information, from every local nook or recess of Greece, which made it in the end a blessing to the land. The great error is to suppose the majority of cases laid before the Delphic Oracle strictly questions for prophetic functions. Ninety-nine in a hundred respected marriages, state-treaties, sales, purchases, founding of towns or colonies, which demanded no faculty whatever of divination, but the nobler faculty of natural sagacity that calculates the natural consequences of human acts co-operating with the local circumstances. If ever I should attempt to trace the steps, or to appraise the value, of Grecian civilisation-the mother of civilisation to all the western earth-it will not be difficult to prove that Delphi discharged the functions of a central bureau d'administration, a general centre of political information, an organ of universal organ isation for the counsels of the whole Grecian race. And that which caused the declension of the Oracles was the loss of political independence and autonomy. After Philip and the day of Charonea, still more after the Roman conquest, each separate state, having no powers, and therefore no motive, for asking counsel on public interests, naturally confined itself more and more to its humbler local interests of police, or even at last to its family arrangements. 1 In drawing towards a close upon the great institution of Oracles, I would wish to point the reader's attention to a feature of strong analogy between these mysterious incorporations and that great modern product of high civilisation— the Banking System. Had the ancients any banks, or any apology for banks? Formally and directly they certainly had not; but indirectly they had an imperfect representative of our banks. What was it? First let me ask-What is the primary and elementary function of a bank-of a good, honest, hard-working, industrious bank? Vixere Bankers ante Agamemnona. But their task was simpler; it was merely to take care of a man's money when he could not take care of it himself. What, because he was drunk? Oh no : but because housebreakers (family-men, as they are called in our flash dictionaries) were in Greece and circumjacent regions far too plentiful. They swarmed in all quarters of needy Greece. What an invitation to you and me, when speculating for a rise in our respective capitals, to suspect a supper table left by the sleeping family to take care of itself and also of all the family plate, with a perfect knowledge on our parts that as small a tool as a mason's trowel will introduce us in six minutes to that same abandoned supper-tray. The word TOXρUXOS, literally wall-borer, or тоixwρνêтηs, wall-underminer, the Greek name for a housebreaker, indicates the brief process through which the Attic burglar seduced and eloped with another man's too charming plate. The artist had but to excavate a peck or two of earth with his trowel; a rabbit's 1 From this point onwards is an addition by De Quincey in 1858 to the paper as it originally appeared in Blackwood for March 1842. -M. burrow was large enough; this he soon improved and widened, using his own body as a gimlet; and very soon he had gimleted himself down amongst the family rats. Then, making free to borrow a rat-hole for a minute, and lying on his back, he soon whittled away or chiselled away the slight piece of carious flooring that divided him from the beautiful object (whether gold or silver) that enamoured him. Between Greece and Rome, in this point, how vast the difference! In Rome the houses were built for eternity-twelve to twenty thousand pounds sterling was no uncommon cost, I believe, for the mansion of a senator. In Athens it is notorious that the houses of citizens the most distinguished,— Miltiades, and soon afterwards Themistocles,—were little better than hovels. And, although it is true that in forty years more, when the star of Pericles began to dawn upon Athens, the houses showed symptoms of improvement, nevertheless, being still built of slight and frail materials, they continued to rest on no massier or deeper foundations than does at this day a Scotch Highland bothy. Stakes or poles, hand-driven into the ground, formed their whole support—not at all stronger than the pegs which hold down the draperies of a soldier's tent. This it was-viz. the make-shift foundation-which so powerfully facilitated the art or "profession" (as I find it called by one lexicographer) of the housebreaker. In fact the art might be viewed as a mode of diving: the Attic burglar dived into the earth on the outside of the walls, and, coming up on the other side, found himself comfortably seated in grandmamma's easy-chair. And, whilst the access was thus easy at Athens, was thus impossible at Rome, on the other hand, the burglars in the former land swarmed like flies in a hot August with us, and in the latter were rare as hornets. With robbery a thousand times easier, and robbers a thousand times more plentiful1-reason enough there was in Athens 1 In fact so plentiful, that even the memorials dearest to their vanity and patriotism-viz. their Battle Trophies-could no otherwise be protected from the rapacity of domestic robbers than by making them of materials which would hardly pay the cost of removal. The Greeks, after any victory of one little rascally clan over another,of Spartans over Thebans, for instance, or (what is more gratifying to imagine) of Thebans over Spartans,-used to do two things in the way of self-glorification: first, they chanted a hymn or pœan (eπaiavišov), And banks, for banks to take charge of a man's money. therefore, of the very strongest construction, the Greeks had, banks that could stand a military siege, and sometimes did. But what was the name of these banks? The name? Why, the name of these banks was temples. Upon a twofold consideration, temples were eligible as banks. In the first place, any temple whatsoever, being regarded as a monument of reverence and gratitude to a divinity, was naturally made as splendid as the disposable funds would allow. Marble, therefore, or stone at the least, was used in constructing the walls and porticoes. But the great weight of marble and stone obliged the architects to lay them upon deep foundations. Hence it happened that, in such altered circumstances, the alliance of a rat, and the loan of a rat-hole, went but a little way towards a prosperous burglary. But there was even a deeper protection to a temple. Being placed under the tutelary care of a divinity, the building enjoyed the prestige which was their mode of singing Te Deum; secondly, they erected a trophy, or memorial of their victory, on the ground. But this trophy one might naturally expect to be framed of the most durable materials; whereas, on the contrary, it was framed of the very frailest, viz. firewood, at sevenpence the cart-load; and the best final result that I, for my part, can suppose from any trophy whatsoever would be that some old woman, living in the neighbourhood of the trophy, went out on favourable nights, and selected fuel enough to warm her poor old Pagan bones through the entire length of a Grecian winter. Why the wood rapidly disappeared is therefore easy to understand: but not why it had ever been relied on as a durable record. The Greeks, however, who were masters in the arts of varnishing and gilding, reported the whole case in the following superfine terms :-"It is right," said they, "and simply a necessity of our human nature, that we should quarrel intermittingly. We Grecians are all brothers, it is true but still even brothers must, for the sake of health, have a monthly allowance of fighting and kicking. Not at all less natural it is that the conquerors in each particular round of our never-ending battle should triumph gloriously, and crow like twenty thousand game cocks, each flapping his wings on his own dunghill, armed with spurs according to the Socratic model left us by Plato. An allowance, in short, of shouting and jubilating is but fair. Still all this should have a speedy end: not only upon the prudential maxim-that he who is the kicking party to-day will often be the kicked party to-morrow; but also on a moral motive-viz. to forget and forgive. Under these suggestions, it becomes right to raise no memorials of fighting triumphs in any but fugitive materials; not therefore of brass, not therefore of marble, which (says the cunning Greek) would be too durable, which |