THE EGYPTIAN STANDARD IN THE TIME OF

JOSEPH

IT appears by the same chronology, that from the death of Noah, to Joseph's promotion and authority in Egypt, there were but 283 years, in which interval no change of measures, from what Noah's family used, is read of. And several Arabian writers affirm, that Joseph, during his regency there, set up the nilometrion, or column, for measuring the increases of Nile; which column is now divided by this Egyptian cubit, and must reasonably be judged from the first to have been divided by the same; because, in all ages the same number of cubits, in the overflow, have been esteemed necessary for the judging of plenty or scarcity like to follow in that country. And there is reason to believe, that the column when divided by him into cubits, was divided according to a cubit that had been used and known before his time, above 283 years, constancy in these things being usual in all settled dominions, is to be presumed rather than change, of which there can no proof be offered. And there are many instances of measures being preserved unaltered for a longer time than that, as we shall hereafter show.

:

Now I only suggest, that the numeration by decads hath been kept among all nations, that I know of, from the eldest times of history and yet it's as alterable by human authority, or agreement, as the measure by cubits and epha's, etc. or as the size of such measures. Now, that these measures and weights were of elder use than Jacob's descent into Egypt, may be argued :—

1. From the measure whereby Noah's ark was designed, viz. round even numbers of cubits, and such cubits as were used and known in Moses his time, else it would have been in vain to have described its measures by a word whose sense was unknown. And if Noah's cubit had been a different measure from the mosaical cubit, Moses must have reduced that into the then known measure, before he wrote the history, which we have reason to believe he did not; because it cannot be expected that such different measure would, upon reduction, have fallen into such even round numbers as Moses sets down; its length just 300 cubits, breadth 50, height 20. The same reason holds in 16 cubits height of the Flood above the hills. So also we read

of Sarah's preparing three seahs of meal, which are an epha (the chief measure of capacity, and the sixth part of the cube of a cubit, as hereafter I shall show) long before the Egyptian bondage.

We have also shekels, the original weight mentioned in Abraham's time, both in Abimelech's gift to Sarah, as the Septuagint and Targum Onkelos express it, Gen. xx. 16: and in his purchase from Ephron the Hittite, in the Hebrew Bible, Gen. xxiii. 15, 16. And just before Jacob's going into Egypt, his money out of Canaan passing by its weight (which therefore must be agreed on) in Egypt, Gen. xliii. 21. And there being no mark to distinguish these weights and measures before the descent into Egypt, from those of the same name mentioned by the same writer after it; it is to be presumed they signify the same quantities exactly, else the word must be equivocal, which ought not to be presumed without full proof.

(From Essay on Jewish Measures and Weights.)

HALIFAX

[George Savile, first Marquis and Earl of Halifax, was born 11th November 1633. He was descended from an ancient Yorkshire family, and succeeded to the paternal baronetcy in 1641. In the year of the Restoration he entered Parliament as member for Pontefract. In 1668 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Savile of Eland and Viscount Halifax, and in the following year he began, as a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, an official career of unusual diversity, including a joint ambassadorship at the Hague. In 1675 his name was struck off the Privy Council, during the ascendancy of Danby, but it was restored in 1679, when he became a member of Shaftesbury's administration and was created Earl of Halifax. He remained in office after Shaftesbury's dismissal, and in 1680 was mainly instrumental in bringing about the rejection of the Exclusion Bill by the House of Lords. In 1682 he was created Marquis of Halifax and appointed Lord Privy Seal. He was, however, out of sympathy with the Court and in favour of the recall of Monmouth; and on the accession of James II., after being removed to the Presidency of the Council, he was in December 1685 dismissed from office. He took an active part in the operations which led to the overthrow of James II., and in the Convention Parliament of 1689 acted as Speaker of the House of Lords. He held office under the new régime as Lord Privy Seal from March 1689 to February 1690; but after this he withdrew from public life, and spent the remainder of his days chiefly in his country-seat of Rufford in Nottinghamshire, to which he was deeply attached. He died 5th April 1695, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Halifax's first wife, Lady Dorothy Spencer, was a daughter of the first Earl of Sunderland and his Countess (Sacharissa").]

AMONG the most celebrated productions of Halifax's pen, it is usual to assign the first place to the Character of a Trimmer (1688), the mere title of which would have sufficed to make its fortune as a tract. But although his sole or joint authorship has long been generally assumed, and is confidently taken for granted by Macaulay, the fact remains that the first three editions attribute the treatise to Sir William Coventry, Halifax's kinsman, -the third, however, stating it to have been revised by Halifax himself. Coventry appears to have denied his authorship, and since the inclusion of the Character in Halifax's Miscellanies, first

published nine years after his death, it has been usually regarded as his. All that can be said with certainty is that he had a good deal to do with it, and that it suits his principles as well as it matches what we know of his style.

To Macaulay modern readers of English history may be said to owe their appreciation of Halifax's rare qualities as a politician and a patriot; nor has any character in his long and brilliant gallery been drawn more generously by the great party historian than that of the Trimmer--who had a soul above party. A whig record of the reigns of Charles II. and James II. may indeed, without arrogance, claim some inner affinity with the spirit of one who thought so nobly of Liberty as did Halifax; and if the passage extracted below was not actually written by him, it may stand as one which he must have entirely approved. On the other hand the tract breathes a patriotism of the most conservative type, and it is, like everything that was written by Halifax or that commended itself to him, the work of one who loved England above everything. Nor need we blame him because in thinking of England he was apt to remember Rufford, his inherited part and parcel of his country.

A Trimmer, then, is one who trims or balances in order to preserve- whether a boat in the river, or the good ship Commonwealth in a sea of troubles. Whether the designation implies honour or dishonour, depends altogether on the bona fides of the individual; just as was the case with the analogous designation of the politiques in France in the days of the internecine struggle between the League and the monarchy. The famous Character— which with the exception of its section on foreign policy hardly deviates from the broad path of apparent, though often highly significant, commonplace—thoroughly vindicates its fundamental conception. "Our Trimmer" stands for a "mixt monarchy”—in other words, he is a constitutionalist of a type which during a full century remained the standard of political liberalism for all practical men, but which in Halifax's day was by no means trite. The "classes" of his generation, it must be remembered, knew something by experience of republican government; while of the evils of monarchical despotism, the Trimmer could give without passion an exposition worthy of the admiration of Montesquieu. matters ecclesiastical his " opinion" is equally enlightened; and he represents that religious liberalism-equally far removed from fanaticism and from indifference—which in later periods of

On

English life has again became as rare as it was in the reigns of our last two Stuart kings. What, however, it would be futile to seek in the Character of a Trimmer, is political philosophy which looks far beyond a given situation. The author is only concerned to apply a few broad principles to matters as they stand; and this he does in language which, though here and there it glows with an unfeigned warmth, disdains neither trivial illustrations nor familiar figures, and rarely rises to so ambitious a height as that of the well-known passage at the close of the tract, which it seemed right not to omit below.

Another well-known tract attributed to Halifax, though the signature T. W. reversed was held by some to point to Sir William Temple, is the Letter to a Dissenter, published on the occasion of James II.'s first Declaration of Indulgence (1687). It was an admirably devised and most opportune attempt to convince the Protestant Nonconformists of the correctness of the timeo Danaos attitude which, with a combination of long-sightedness and fortitude almost unparalleled, a large proportion of their body assumed, and in spite of discouragement upon discouragement maintained. The argument of the solidarity of the Protestant interest was in itself excellent; the weakness of the position taken up by the writer of the Letter, which he did his best to cover with the help of a style full of liveliness and wit, lay in the paucity of the examples at his disposal of the readiness of the Church of England to acknowledge the solidarity in question. The Letter called forth a full score of replies; but while I perceive no reason for doubting Halifax's authorship of it, I cannot suppose him to have written the dogmatic Second Letter to a Dissenter, etc. (1687), which appeared in the course of the controversy. Among other political pieces that have been attributed to Halifax are the happily-named and shrewd, but rather drily written, Anatomy of an Equivalent (i.e. for oaths and tests); the very interesting Cautions offered to the consideration of those who are to choose Members to serve in the ensuing Parliament, which apparently belongs to the year 1689, and contains a most curious picture, drawn without narrow-mindedness, of the social composition of a House of Commons of the times; and A Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea (1694). In this pamphlet, which, if written by Halifax, was probably his last political piece, he seeks, not very effectively, to "trim" between the two different systems of appointment to commissions, which in the Navy and elsewhere it

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