From this period it has dwindled almost to nothing under the
benumbing sceptre of turkish despotism. It’s mixed inhabitants
of various nations have been lately reckoned not to exceed fourteen
or fifteen thousand; though it is said to have furnished the
Porte with four thousand men, soldiers and sailors, in the last rus-
sian war: and instead of that superb and spacious city, of which
there are not now even ruins enough remaining to trace it with
accuracy, we have only wretched houses and paltry mosques, occupying
a little neck of land between the two ports.
The progressive decline of this city is marked by it’s walls.
These were raised by one of the successors of Saladin, who had
just taken Egypt out of the hands of the khaliffs of the race of
Fatima, in the beginning of the thirteenth century. They are
composed of fragments of marble and broken columns, the wreck
of the ancient city, confounded with common stones; are of great
thickness; and are flanked by a hundred towers. A circuit of
five miles only is enclosed by them, which shows how much the
extent of the city must have been contracted at that period; and
even of this space a great portion is now waste ground, occupied
by piles of rubbish, and scattered fragments of edifices destroyed.
Such is now Alexandria, founded by the great pupil of Aristotle,
rising into extraordinary splendour under the earliest of the
Ptolemies, the seat of learning, the emporium of the world, where
Caesar, enthralled by the charms and wiles of Cleopatra, had nearly
sunk in that flood of luxury, by which Antony was afterward
overwhelmed, leaving the temperate Augustus to enjoy unrivalled
the empire of Rome.