DE MORTULS.
[TO THE EDITOR OP TNZ "SPECTATOR:9
Sin,—A question of deep interest is touched upon in your correspondent's interesting letter from Luxor in the Spectator of February 10th. Whence comes our right to play havoc with the Egyptian dead ? "to tear open the cerements piously wound about the revered corpse four thousand years ago, and expose in glass cases the blackened, naked carcases of Kings and Princesses,"—nay, more than this, to insult the abiding mystery of death itself ? It is true that the ritual of the ancient Egyptians is obsolete; it may be that the imagery with which they clothed the idea of death and futurity seems to us grotesque—the cynocephalous ape officiating at the scales to weigh the soul ; the symbolic door through which the Soul and Ka should find ingress and egress from the tomb—but may it not be in seeming only that our imagery is less grotesque than theirs ? We hold death sacred with our co-religionists ; does its sacredness depend upon creed and imagery? and does the lapse of centuries alter the conditions P These and all future times are immeasurably indebted to the Egyptologists for the historic knowledge they have gleaned or unravelled in the tombs ; but who is benefited by the snatching of the poor inhabitants to be exhibited in glass cases at sixpence, or nothing, a head? Oat of his last home, we know, Imperial Cmsar dead and turned to clay, might have been of some slight use,—but as for these ? Are any of us more benefited by the desecration of their remains than the two little vulgar boys who, a few days ago in the British Museum, asked me, "Please, sir, where are the dummies P "-
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