The managing partner manages a great many benevolent societies, but it is unnecessary here to mention more than one. This is the Advice-to-the-poor-and-needy-giving Ladies' Samaritan Association. The business of this admirable institution is carried on by the lady-collectors, who solicit subscriptions, chiefly from the bachelors on their beat; and the lady-missionaries, who visit the lowest dens in the place, to distribute, with a beautiful philanthropy, moral Tracts, and Exhortations to be good, tidy, church-going, and happy, to the ragged and starving inmates. Although these, however, are the functionaries ostensible to the public, it is the managing partner who sets them in motion. She is neither president nor vice-president, nor treasurer nor secretary, nor collector nor missionary; but she is a power over all these, supreme, though nameless. She is likewise the editor (with a sub-editor for work) of the tracts and exhortations; and in the course of this duty she mingles charity with business in a way well worthy of imitation. The productions in question are usually received gratuitously, for advice of all kinds, as we have remarked, is common and plenty; but sometimes the demand is so great as to require the aid of a purchased pen. On such occasions the individual employed by the managing partner is a broken-down clergyman, who was deprived at once of his sight and his living by the visitation of God, and who writes for the support of a wife and fourteen children. This respectable character is induced, by fear of competition, and the strong necessity of feeding sixteen mouths with something or other, to use his pen for the Association at half-price; while he is compelled by his circumstances to reside in the very midst of the destitution he addresses, where he learns in suffering what he teaches in prose-ing. But, notwithstanding all this beautiful management, her schemes, being of human device, sometimes fail. An example of this is offered by the one she originated on hearing the first terrible cry of Destitution in the Highlands. Under her auspices, the Female Benevolent Trousers Society became extremely popular. Its object, of course, was to supply these garments gratuitously to the perishing mountaineers, in lieu of the cold unseemly kilt. It was discovered, however, after a time, that the Highlanders do not wear kilts at all; and the society was broken up, and its funds handed over, at the suggestion of the institutor, for the Encouragement of the interesting Mieau tribe of Old Christians in Abyssinia. The tenets of this tribe, you are aware, are in several instances wonderfully similar to our own; only, they abjure in their totality the filthy rags of the moral law, which has drawn upon them the bitter persecution of the heathenish Mohammedans in their neighbourhood.
We have observed that the managing partner is impatient of another counsellor. This is a remarkable trait in her character. Even the woman of the world looks with approbation upon the doings of a congener, when they do not come into collision with her own; even the everyday married lady bends her head confidentially towards her double, as they sit side by side, and rises from the tête-à-tête charmed and edified: the managing partner alone is solitary and unsocial. This is demanded by the lofty nature of her duties. Every business, great and small, should have a single head to direct; and she feels satisfied, after dispassionate reflection, that the best head of all is her own. This makes her wish conscientiously that there was only one business on the earth, that all mankind were her clients, and that there was not another individual of her class extant.
In her last moments, and only then, this great-minded woman thinks of herself—if that can be said to be herself which remains in the world after she is defunct. She thinks of what is to become of her body, and feels a melancholy pleasure in arranging the ceremonies of its funeral. Everything must be ordered by herself; and when the last is said, her breath departs in a sigh of satisfaction. But sometimes death is in a hurry, or her voice low and indistinct. It happened in a case of this kind, that a doubt arose in the minds of the bystanders as to the shoulder she intended to be taken by one of the friends. They looked at her; but her voice was irretrievably gone, and they considered that, in so far as this point was concerned, the management had devolved upon them. Not so: the dying woman could not speak; but with a convulsive effort, she moved one of her hands, touched the left shoulder, and expired.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum is an excellent maxim; but in concluding this sketch, there can be no harm in at least regretting the imperfection of human nature. If its eminent subject, instead of spending abroad upon the world her great capacity, had been able to concentrate it in some measure upon herself and family, there can be little doubt that she would have been regarded in society with less of the contempt which genius, and less of the dislike which virtue inspires in the foolish and wicked, and that fewer unreflecting readers would at this moment be whispering to themselves the concluding line of Pope's malignant libel—
THE MOUNTAIN OF THE CHAIN AND ITS LEGEND
The neighbourhood of Gebel Silsilis, or the Mountain of the Chain, is very interesting in many respects. After flowing for some distance through the usual strip of alluvial plain, bordered by not very lofty undulating ground, the Nile suddenly sweeps into a gap between two imposing masses of rock that overhang the stream for above a mile on either hand. The appearance of the precipices thus hemming in and narrowing so puissant a volume of water, covered with eddies and whirlpools, would be picturesque enough in itself; but we have here, in addition, an immense number of caves, grottos, quarries, and rock-temples, dotting the surface of the rock, and suggesting at first sight the idea of a city just half ground down and solidified into a mountain. On the western bank, numerous handsome façades and porticos have indeed been hewn out; and mightily interesting they were to wander through, with their elaborate tablets and cursory inscriptions, their hieroglyphical scrolls, their sculptured gods and symbols, and all the luxury of their architectural ornaments. But the grandest impressions are to be sought for on the other side, whence the materials of whole capital cities must have been removed. There is, in fact, a wilderness of quarries there, approached by deep perpendicular cuts, like streets leading from the river's bank, which must have furnished a wonderful amount of sandstone to those strange old architects who, whilst they sometimes chose to convert a mountain into a temple, generally preferred to build up a temple into a mountain. It takes hours merely to have a glimpse at these mighty excavations, some of which are cavernous, with roofs supported by huge square pillars, but most of which form great squares worked down to an enormous depth.
The rock's on the western bank are not isolated, but seem to be the termination of a range projecting from the interior of the desert; and a minor range, branching off, hugs the river to the northward pretty closely for a great distance; but those on the other side are separated by what may almost be called a plain from the Arabian chain of hills, and might be supposed by the fanciful to have been formerly surrounded by the rapid waters of the Nile. They are admirably placed for the purpose to which they were applied; and although I have not the presumption to fix dates, and say under what dynasty the quarries first began to be worked, there is no rashness in presuming that it must have been at a very early period indeed. The sandstone is excellent for building purposes—far superior to the friable limestone found lower down—and has been removed not only from this one block, but from both sides, here and there, for a considerable distance to the north. Many quarries likewise no doubt remain still undiscovered and unexplored in this neighbourhood. We found the mountains worked more or less down as far as Ramadeh; and inscriptions and sculptures, evidently dating from very ancient times, are met with in many.