the desert, was the ancient land of Goshen.

The town of Ismailia is a comfortable French settlement, with several thousand inhabitants, a good inn, and some handsome houses, and stands on a gently rising ground, falling down to Lake Timseh (the Lake of the Crocodiles), now a bitter salt lake. This station is destined to be the future inland port of the Suez Canal, being about half-way on the direct maritime canal between Port Said on the Mediterranean and Suez on the Red Sea.

Only two-at most, three years ago— when M. Lesseps went to Ismailia with two other persons, his caravan consisted of about forty camels to carry his tent, a few provisions, and water; now you are as comfortable at Ismailia as in most provincial towns in France. Not only did we sit down, about thirty, to a most excellent dinner, but we attended mass in the morning and witnessed a marriage, and went to a ball in the evening. At Ismailia there is a very huge force-pump, which supplies with Nile water the district along the seawater canal to Port Said. Ismailia is named not only after Ismail Pacha, the late viceroy, but after Ishmael, as, according to Arab tradition, it was here that Hagar and her son were turned out to perish in the wilderness.

The salt-water canal begins near Lake Timseh, and the worst part of the excavation is at the Seuil de Gisr, where there is a very heavy and long cutting through an elevation, partly sand and partly rock. The French have, however, erected a very large and powerful dredge, worked by steam power, which cuts away the sand and fills trucks, which are conveyed by railroad some distance along the canal, and emptied on to its banks where wanted. This machine fills a railway truck with sand in two minutes, and does the work of about 40,000 men.

At El-Gisr the party breakfasted at the house of the head-engineer of the works. In the midst of the desert he has a garden so well watered that snipe come frequently, and fall a prey to some cats kept for other purposes. After

breakfast we saw the engine perform its work, and then went in a tender lined with matting along the line, to see the sand emptied out. The canal of seawater is still very shallow, and not half its width; and the voyage was diversified by our having to get out occasionally to lighten the boat when it stuck, and by various vagaries on the part of the camels which drew us. The distance of our first sea voyage on the Suez Canal, from Ismailia to Cantara (the bridge) is thirty-five kilometres. We reached Cantara, which is the place where the Syrian caravans to and from Egypt stop and water, at eight at night. To show the importance of this station, we will give a list of the traffic going through it. During the month of November, there passed the bridge at Cantara 7,260 camels, 1,392 horses, 362 mules, 775 donkeys, 1,189 cattle, 3,408 sheep, and 849 goats, going from Syria into Egypt; and about one half of the quantity of the same beasts went from Egypt into Syria. At Cantara we visited the hospital, which is clean, and paid a visit to the Greek doctor, who is married to an Englishwoman. Near Cantara there is admirable shooting; gazelles and wild boars abound; but you must go some ten or twelve miles, to a belt of wood, in search of them.

From Cantara we started early, and went to Raz-el-Aich, where the canal has assumed its proper dimensions-fiftyeight metres wide. From Raz-el-Aich to Port Said we went in a small steamer.

Part of this day's journey was through the Lake Menzaleh, and it is here that the chief difficulties are to be apprehended. The liquid mud at the bottom of the lake will make the deepening of the canal to its proper depth of eight metres or twentyseven feet, and keeping it at that uniform depth, a matter of great difficulty. The French will soon, however, have about sixty-five large powerful dredges at work; which will do the work hitherto done by forced labour, or free labour, difficult to obtain. When the barges are filled with the liquid mud, they are towed to the side of the canal, where powerful cranes take up the trucks full of mud out of the barges, and empty

These

their contents on the bank. powerful cranes have also an ingenious contrivance attached to them, by which they convey their own railroads along the bank.

The voyage through the Lake Menzaleh is interesting, from the constant mirage, and the enormous flocks of flamingoes and pelicans, snipe and wild duck. The flamingoes, standing by thousands in the shallow water, look like rosy-coloured islands in the distance; and in their flight they present now a white surface, and occasionally, as they wheel, a rosy surface, to the sun's rays.

The proportions of the canal when finished will be 58 metres wide at the top and 22 metres wide at the bottom; the depth is to be 8 metres, or about 27 feet. The company hope in a couple of years to open it with a depth of 5 metres all the way from Port Said to Suez.

The distance from Ismailia to Port Said on the Mediterranean is 85 kilometres. Port Said is entirely a new creation.

Two or three years ago, when M. Lesseps first went to the spot, it consisted of a narrow strip of sand dividing Lake Menzaleh from the Mediterranean. His companions scraped up some sand from the sea-beach and spread it over the black mud left by the lake-there his tent was pitched. Now Port Said has nearly 4,500 Europeans; and about 1,500 Arabs live in an Arab village adjoining. It boasts a cercle, a Catholic and a Greek church, and an Arab mosque; there is a Bazaar universal, together with some very good lodgings on the Quai Eugenie, and it is altogether a thriving town. A pier which is to be 1,500 metres in length is partly built; the chief use of it at present seems to be as a fishing station for all the young Greeks and vagabonds of the place. Every minute these young rascals pulled out fish varying from two to four pounds in weight; and, when it blows hard, the fish-a sort of coarse grey mullet- -are thrown on the sands and caught by the hand.

Port Said is the workshop for all the Isthmus of Suez material. Large blocks

of sand and cement are there prepared for the future pier, and steam engines, worked by French, Greeks, and Arabs, prepare all the rough material, and put together the iron tanks, barges, and machinery sent from Marseilles and elsewhere. The Greeks are said to work well at any labour requiring change. They will fill tanks and barges, and then convey them to the bank, and they work at the dredges and cranes; but the Arabs are the best at dull, continuous, and monotonous work.

At Port Said, Osman Pacha, the envoy sent from Constantinople to arrange the land question with the Isthmus of Suez Canal Company, joined the party, with his suite of secretaries, engineers, and two Circassian body guards, splendidly armed. He had come with tents, and meant to live with separate establishments; but such was the good reception given by the Company that he became M. Lesseps's guest, and his tents were sent to an encampment on the Bitter Lake, not far from Suez, where as yet no houses have been built.

The next day at Port Said was spent in visiting the works now in progress— among other places the water reservoir, which seems to have frightened some alarmists in this country, who magnified this round peaceful reservoir into a formidable fort.

The following day a forced voyage was made from Port Said to Ismailia, and the next day the whole party went on to Suez by the soft-water canal.

23

SIR,-If I agree with you that Mr. Dicey has not said all which needs to be said about the "Histoire de Jules César," I rejoice that it has found so able an expositor and defender. One who thoroughly appreciates a book is most competent to tell us what it means. We can consider for ourselves how far the meaning satisfies us; if it explains the past to us; what light it throws upon our times. In this instance the devil's advocates will not be few; each one of us may be inclined to snatch at that office. To have the reasons fairly and skilfully presented to us, why a book, avowedly recommending the policy of the Napoleonic house-because that was the policy of the Cæsars -should take its place in the canonised literature of the world, is an advantage which we should not undervalue.

In one respect Mr. Dicey's treatment of the book seems to me fairer than that which it has received from its reviewers generally. Its worth as an explanation of Roman life is entirely subordinate, in his judgment, to its worth as an exhibition of the faith and purpose of the writer. Such criticism is, of course, open to cavils. It may be said that, on this showing,

"Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, Just stops a hole to keep the wind away,' when it is blowing with inconvenient vehemence from any quarter in the direction of the house of Bonaparte.

It may be said-it has been said with great effect-that the name of the man who, with all his vices, was full of genial sympathies and a noble cultivation, has been only adopted to conceal the real author of the imperial system, the real object of imperial admiration-the second triumvir, the

betrayer of Cicero. But these objections, however reasonable in themselves, do not affect Mr. Dicey's position. The theories of a man who has translated, or is translating them into facts, must be more important to us than any explanation of bygone events or characters can be. If they appear in the form of such an explanation, its value cannot depend merely or chiefly upon its

correctness.

Another observation of Mr. Dicey concerns us even more than this. We call the book of the Emperor a fatalist book. Well, asks his able counsel, and are you not all fatalists ? What signifies it that you ever and anon change the word fate or destiny for Providence, and spell that word with a capital letter? Does that make any real difference? Do you mean more than he means? A very profitable and severe examination this which your contributor has forced upon us-a very righteous admonition to beware of judging lest we should be judged.

Instead of protesting against this statement, I discover in it what may be a deliverance to us from much confusion and some hypocrisy. It is the topic on which I propose chiefly to dwell in this letter. Enough, perhaps, has been said as to the merits and demerits of a work which as yet we know only in its commencement. But the principle of it, which is set forth clearly in the preface, which is to be consistently and logically' applied hereafter to the facts of the ancient and of the modern world, must always be occupying us in one form or another. If it is true, as Mr. Dicey says, that we adopt that principle habitually-if it is also true, as he says, that we grumble at it and protest

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against it continually-these apparently opposite facts deserve investigation. I admit them both; I admit that our displeasure sometimes vents itself in railings which would be far less bitter and spiteful if we had not a secret consciousness that we were fighting with an enemy who had an ally in our own hearts. I wish as much as Mr. Dicey can that we should abstain from such railings. They hurt the Emperor little; they may hurt our sincerity and resolution very much.

I think, however, that Mr. Dicey has weakened his own argument, if he has not done us injustice, by one of his complaints. The First Napoleon, in the judgment of his nephew and of the world generally, embodied more perfectly the fatalist principle-as he was more thoroughly possessed by the fatalist belief than any other man. We ought, therefore, being ourselves under the dominion of that principle and that belief, to regard him with greater respect than we pay to most other men. That, Mr. Dicey affirms, is the case with the people of the Continent generally, with Frenchmen almost universally. We, he affirms, are the exception. We cleave to the traditions of the Georgian era. Punch reproduces the obsolete jests of Gilray. That there was a revival of the feelings which prevailed in Great Britain during the first twenty years of this century at the time of the Coup d'Etat ; that they were kindled afresh-after a -suspension during the Crimean war—at the commencement of the Volunteer movement; that the Gilray spirit may return to our caricaturists when a book appears which identifies the policy of the Third Napoleon with that of the First, I do not deny. But I heard Mr. Emerson tell a London audience, what he had probably told a Boston audience before, that we of the middle class were all in our hearts worshippers of Napoleon, because he was on a large scale what we aspired to be on a small scale. I believe he spoke truly. He might have acquired his conviction in America. It might apply more directly to the then united democratic community, ambitious

of conquest, than to us. But our withers were not unwrung by those strong words. Very strong they were; for no doubt it was our class which had toasted the good old king and delighted in Gilray's portraits. Circumstances have occurred since Mr. Emerson spoke and wrote which may make us regard the golden image which he described to us with more shrinking, with less awe. But, if the sack but and psaltery and all instruments should summon us to fall down before it, I ask myself how many of us would stand erect, whether any would accept a burning fiery furnace as the alternative.

The

Since I detect what appear to me the preludings to this various and magnificent music in the History of Cæsar, I am anxious to inquire what the service is to which it would invite us. When I turn for this purpose to the book, I at once recognise a genuine record of a "fatal gravitation downwards in the people of Rome. chapter on the Gracchi, on Marius, and Sylla exhibits very forcibly a growth of faction and selfishness among the aristocracy, efforts vigorous but impotent in democratic leaders to assert for the excluded classes a share in the privileges which were monopolized-the first participating in all the violence of those whom they would have described as leaders of the mob; the latter as ambitious and reckless, when their hour came, as the men whose conduct had justified their resistance.

The picture

may or may not be faithful in its costume and its details; the outline I suppose no one will deny to be correct. The inference is that which the whole book is occupied with. All this must go on till a man appears who understands his age, who sees the defects and partialities of his predecessors, and shuns them; who merges aristocracy and democracy in himself; who becomes the founder of an empire. Here is that irresistible "logic," to the rules of which we are taught, in the opening of the Preface, that all history must conform itself. The writer has evidently the deepest assurance that there can be no

departure from it. And can there be? Is not this law of fate the eternal unchangeable law? Before we answer let us revolve for one moment a perplexity which will strike most readers at some step or another of their historical studies. We see the downward destiny clearly enough; but the upward? Does the same fate bring about that continual declension which is exhibited with so much power, and the man of genius who sets all right? The Emperor has a righteous horror of referring great events to small causes; can he refer contrary events to the same cause?

When this doubt has been once started it gains strength from a passage in the Preface which no one could overlook, but which might have been read carelessly. It is this: "Ce qui précede "montre assez le but que je me propose en "écrivant cette histoire. Ce but est de prouver que lorsque LA PROVIDENCE "suscite des hommes tels que César, Charle

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magne, Napoléon, c'est pour tracer aux "peuples la voie qu'ils doivent suivre," &c. Of course, if such sentences occurred in any ordinary writer, we should merely say, with Mr. Dicey, "Providence, in spite of the article and the capital, is only another word for fate." And, though this is a classical passagethough it must have been written with great care, seeing it is to declare the very purpose of the book-though a writer whose aim is to be logical ought to be unusually careful in the choice of his expressions-we might, nevertheless, allow for a good-natured concession to the prejudices of the times, for a harmless conciliation of the parti prêtre, and think no more of the poor phrase. But we see that it is not the logic of expressions, but the logic of facts, which is in question. There are two different -two opposite-sets of facts to be accounted for. The rigid logician seems to hint that it may be needful to call in a new agent to solve one set of them. I do not believe that he intends it, but we have a right to know how the difficulty is avoided.

And it is not the only one. The fatal process of declension we have no doubt

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they, who were soon to send forth a "more degraded offspring "-this great dogma of one who witnessed the commencement of the Empire is illustrated for us in the story of the Republic. But whence was the decline? Where was the good of which this state of things was the corruption? Here we are at fault. The author of the "History" assumes the old story of the kings. Be it so; on critical grounds I have no objection. But, when he tells me of the institutions of Numa, I find just as much of a deliberate scheme to make a religion which shall uphold a polity already made-just as deliberate contrivances to produce certain impressions about the invisible world, for the sake of accomplishing certain results in the visible world-as I could impute to the augurs in the days of Cicero, who could not look each other in the face without laughing. All from beginning to end is a scheme-a scheme, no doubt, in which fate had its hand, as well as the man of genius. But it was a lie, and what portion of the lie was contributed by fate, what by the man of genius, does not seem to me of much consequence. I want to know where the degeneracy could be from such a stock as this? An ever-growing development of falsehood there might be; but to talk of the primitive virtues disappearing of gold, or conquest, or Greek scepticism impairing the nobleness of a people whose institutions and whose belief had this root-is not logic, but a sheer outrage upon sense.

What follows? Our fatalist historian, being very skilful in tracing the cause of decay in a nation, but being utterly unable to discover the good of the nation which is implied in its decay, and therefore to explain how that good may be restored, is compelled to assume as his highest ideal a man who, being raised above the level of his contemporaries, gathers into himself all their habits and tempers, and so is recognised as the leader before whom they must bow.