DEATH OF THE FIRST-BORN.

THIS was the last and most fearful of those plagues with which the king of Egypt provoked the Almighty to visit him as a punishment for withholding that freedom from the children of Israel which God had determined they should enjoy. Egypt had long been the scene of a tyranny so burthensome to the Israelites, that they suffered a bondage worse than death under a despot who despised the Lord and his people. Hard as was the heart of Pharaoh, it was not impenetrable, and the sudden stroke which cut off the hope of Egypt, in his own first-born son, rived that obdurate bosom which a sight of the severest daily sufferings had hitherto left without an impression. The wrath of God was at length terribly roused at the daring and obduracy of the Egyptian king and of his idolatrous subjects. After having visited them with divers plagues, which failed to bring them to a proper sense of their impious rebellion in resisting his will, by refusing liberty to the Israelites, he at length, as a climax of infliction, "smote all the first-born in their land, the chief of all their strength *." At midnight the messenger of death passed through the royal city and throughout the whole land of Egypt, and there was not a family spared. "While all things, O Lord, were in quiet silence, and that night was in the midst of her swift course, thine Almighty word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne, as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land of destruction, and brought thine unfeigned commandment as a sharp sword, and stauding up, filled all things with death; and it touched the heaven, but it stood upon the earth. Then suddenly visions of horrible dreams troubled them sore, and terrors came upon them unlooked for t." In the picture the first-born of Pharaoh appears stretched upon his couch a corpse. The bereaved king stands gazing upon him in silent agony, while the physician, placing his hand upon the breast of the body to ascertain if any pulsation were still perceptible, turns with a gesture of reproach towards the nurse, who expresses her grief by vehement cries. The mother, meanwhile, has thrown herself upon the corpse, which she clasps in a mute paroxysm of woc.

*Psalm cv., verse 36.

THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM

WEEPING.

It is a conjecture of Saint Chrysostom, that the Israelites, when sent captive to Babylon, were not permitted to dwell within any of the towns or cities of the empire, but were dispersed upon the banks of different rivers, where they erected dwellings; and in consequence of the continual overflowings of those streams, were kept in perpetual alarm for their security being moreover obliged to drain the land in which they were allowed to colonize in order to render it habitable. From the incessant hardships to which they were exposed, they were constantly mourning their miserable condition. Their cries were loud and bitter, when they remembered the happiness they had quitted for the privations of captivity. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof." They had no longer a tabernacle ; their harps, with which, in their own happy Palestine, the land of joy and gladness, they used to sing praises to the Lord Jehovah, now remained unstrung, for how should they "sing the Lord's song in a strange land," where they were most probably forbidden to erect a synagogue, and where their worship was derided by their tyrants, who heaped upon them the degradations of a most odious vassalage? The artist has represented the daughters of Jerusalem bewailing, upon the banks of the Euphrates, the wretched state of their country and themselves. Their harps are hung upon willows that droop over the placid waters, betokening the perfect desuetude of that sacred minstrelsy to which they had been so joyously attuned in the land of Judea. In the distance the gorgeous City of Babylon is in its "pride of place," towering above the calm surface of the river, as if in imperious mockery of the woes which its sovereign had accumulated upon the unhappy seed of Abraham, whom he is supposed to have treated with the most unrelenting tyranny.