The soundless sobs of dark and burning tears, That none have seen; they smile no more, to breathe The patriarchal Queen, the monument Of touching widowhood, of endless love, And childlike purity-she sleeps. This night Is watchful not. The restless hand, that slave To duty, to a master-mind, to wisdom That fathomed history and saw beyond The times, lies still in marble whiteness. Love The dove-like wings, that long were wont to hover And now will soar and sing, as harp-chords sing, Nor ashes! Light eternal! Hymns of joy! No silence now for her, who, ever silent Above misfortune's storms and thund'ring billows Would stand with clear and fearless brow, so calm, That men drew strength from out those dauntless eyes And there is something of this self-same strength and quiet to be gleaned and garnered from the life and works of Roumania's Queen of Hearts and Rhyme. At this meeting, in the absence of the President, the Earl of Halsbury, who had been compelled to leave the Society's rooms earlier in the afternoon by the demands of public business, Prof. W. L. Courtney, Vice-President, presided, and, in formally admitting Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth of Roumania as an Honorary Fellow of the Society, expressed the gratification of the President, Council, and general body of the Fellows in having the name of "Carmen Sylva" on the Roll of the Society. His Excellency, M. Nicolas Mishu, the Roumanian Minister, as Her Majesty's proxy, said :— "I am commanded by Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth to convey to you Carmen Sylva's' most heartfelt thanks for the great com pliment you have bestowed upon her by electing her an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. "Our crowned poetess is the more proud to be a Fellow of your Society, since yours is a literature that has given forth so many of the world's greatest works in the imaginative realm. "Carmen Sylva,' from her earliest attempts in art and literature, has acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the leading manifestations of the English creative genius. She still follows with the deepest interest all the latest efforts of your modern literature, and is a sincere admirer of its high standards. "In a booklet published some twenty years ago, entitled The Thoughts of a Queen, Carmen Sylva' said that the only happiness is duty, the only consolation work, the only joy in life the love of the beautiful.' "This ideal is also yours, and it was therefore but natural that 'Carmen Sylva's' name and thoughts should be closely linked to the Royal Society of Literature. "In your strivings for the highest ideals in literature you will always have with you Carmen Sylva,' the royal poetess. "In her name, therefore, I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and you, Prof. Gerothwohl, for the eloquent words of appreciation which you have spoken at this solemn gathering." THE NATIVE LITERATURE OF CHRISTIAN EGYPT. BY STEPHEN GASELEE, F.R.S.L., [Read April 22nd, 1914.] By the word "native" which I have employed in the title of this paper I mean "untranslated"; the vast majority of the remains of Christian Egyptian literature which has survived until the present time was translated from the Greek; a little from Syriac, mere traces from Latin, Arabic, Ethiopic. It is my object to give some account of that which is Egyptian in origin-first written in Egyptian language. I shall not delay you long with an historical account of the beginnings of a literature in Christian Egypt, but the brief sketch that here follows is necessary for the proper understanding of the conditions under which it grew up. Never, perhaps, in the history of the world did one nation take upon itself more completely, at any rate in appearance, the culture of another, than Egypt, when it accepted Greek ideas and expressions of thought after its conquest by Alexander the Great. Quicker far than in later days, when "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit" at Rone, about A.D. 300 "Graecia captrix" seemed to have won a spiritual and intellectual, as well as a physical, VOL. XXXIII. 3 victory over the land of the Pharaohs. The successful invasion by Alexander was no mere foreign raid,* of which every trace would disappear in two or three generations. That old nation, which had bent, but never broken, before the cruel blast of the monotheist invader from Persia, seemed to take to its inmost being without a shudder the civilisation, decadent perhaps, but not yet corrupt, of imperial Greece. I should esteem it, therefore, no mere chance that in the Christian literature of Egypt the figure of Alexander appears almost with the halo of a saint. The author of the Alexander romance, PseudoCallisthenes,' which is known to us partly in Greek, Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian, and more than fully in Ethiopic, represents him as at once the ideal of a Christian knight and a missionary of the Gospel before the Gospel existed-a preacher by prolepsis of the Trinity-and at the same time (did not Theocritust call the Egyptians Kakà Taiуvia," roguish cheats") the progeny of the frailty of Olympias with the last native-born king of Egypt, the sorcerer Nectanebo. The land of the Nile, at any rate, became profoundly Hellenised. The Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies, though it adopted some of the less praiseworthy customs of the country, such as the regular marriage of brother and sister, established at the top of society a Greek culture, which percolated far downward; in architecture, money, games, all social life, the land became as Greek as Asia Minor, if not as * J. Leipoldt, "Geschichte der koptischen Litteratur," in Geschichte der christlichen Litteraturen des Orients (Die Litteraturen des Ostens, vii, 2),' Leipzig, 1907, p. 133, sqq. + Id., xv, 50. Greece itself; even the venerable Egyptian language seems to have retreated before the invader, and many of the more important inscriptions of Ptolemaic times which remain to us are in Greek. When the old language was employed the hieroglyphic system of writing was retained for certain ceremonial purposes; hieratic had nearly disappeared before demotic, which was used where the vulgar might have to read. It is not uncommon, for instance, to find the name on a mummy-ticket both in Greek and Demotic. Greek became the language of the Court, the army, the civil service, the law; even new gods were invented, to be added to the already overgrown Egyptian pantheon, of half-Greek attributes and names. Such were Serapis and Harpocrates, two hybrid deities whose worship became immensely popular among the Graecised Egyptians of the two last centuries before Christ. Yet I purposely used the words "in appearance when I described the extent to which Greek culture had been assumed. The process of Hellenisation had not reached down to the lowest strata of all. The peasants-Fellaheen, very like their successors of to-day-kept their own language and their own religion. I think that their steadfastness was more the result of obstinacy than of patriotism or piety. Egypt has always been a country at heart "ag'in the Government." Look, for instance, at its religious history in later Christian times; when the Empire was Arian, Egypt was orthodox; when the Empire became orthodox, nothing would do for Egypt but to become and remain monophysite. The Greeks and Graecised Egyptians were an object of hatred to |