Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE TEMPLE OF ISIS. ITS PRIEST THE CHARACTER OF ARBACES DEVELOPES ITSELF. The story returns to the Egyptian. We left Arbaces upon the shores of the nooh-day sea, after he had parted from Glaucus and his companion. As he approached to the more crowded part of the bay, he paused and gazed upon that animated scene with folded arms, and a bitter smile upon his dark features. " Gulls, dupes, fools that ye are!" muttered he to himself; " whether business or pleasure, trade or religion, he your pursuit, you are equally cheated by the passions that ye should rule ! How I could loathe you, if I did not hate—yes, hate ! Greek or Roman, it is from us, from the dark lore of Egypt, that ye have stolen the fire that gives you souls. Your knowledge—your poesy — your laws—your arts—your barbarous mastery of war (all how tame and mutilated, when compared with the vast original !)—ye have filched, as a slave filches the fragments of the feast, from us ! And now, ye mimics of a mimic ! — Romans forsooth ! the mushroom herd of robbers!—ye are our masters ! the pyramids look down no more on the race of Rameses—the eagle cowers over the serpent of the Nile. Our masters—no, not mine. My soul, by the power of its wisdom, controls and chains you, though the fetters are unseen. So long as craft can master force, so long as religion has a cave from which oracles can dupe mankind, the wise hold an empire over earth. Even from your vices Arbaces distils his pleasures;— pleasures unprofaned by vulgar eyes — pleasures vast, wealthy, inexhaustible, of which your enervate minds, in their unimaginative sensuality, cannot conceive or dream ! Plod on, plod on, fools of ambition and of avarice ! yourpetty thirst for fasces and quaestorships, and all the mummery of servile power, provokes my la...