]
A modern traveller has however, with much ingenuity of conjecture, given
us an excellent reason why the Sphinx was peculiar to Egypt, as the
Nile was observed to overflow when the sun was in those signs of the
Zodiack:
The lion virgin Sphinx, which shows
What time the rich Nile overflows.
And sure I think, as people lived longer then than they do now; as Moses
was contemporary with Cecrops, so that monarchy and a settled form of
government had begun to obtain footing in Greece, and apparently
migrated a little westward even then; that this column might have
employed the artists of those days, without any such exceeding stretch
of probability as our modern Aristotelians study to make out, from their
zeal to establish his doctrine of the world's eternity. While, if
conjecture were once as liberally permitted to believers as it is
generously afforded to scepticks, I know not whether a hint concerning
Sphinx's original might not be deduced from old Israel's last blessing
to his sons; _The lion of Judah_, with the _head of a virgin_, in whose
offspring that lion was one day to sink and be lost, except his hinder
parts; might naturally enough grow into a favourite emblem among the
inhabitants of a nation who owed their existence to one of the family;
and who would be still more inclined to commemorate the mystical
blessing, if they observed the fructifying inundation to happen
regularly, as Mr.
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