his own book in England, omitting the notes and references, for the use of the working-classes, of whose appreciation, as I have previously mentioned, he had received many gratifying proofs; he had made his arrangements for this purpose, but was prevented from carrying them out by the opposition of his publishers, who objected that such an edition would injure their interest in the more, costly edition. But Mr. Buckle freely declared that he would, in his circumstances, rather forego the profit on the sale of his book than restrict its circulation.

I may, perhaps, be permitted to mention that another English author related to me his home experience, precisely to the same effect, in which the vested interests of his publishers thwarted him in his wish to publish an edition of his writings at a low price for general circulation. It is quite certain that the British public must themselves be disenthralled from the tyranny of high prices with which they are now burdened, before they can ask to bring another land under the dominion of their exclusive system in literature.

This conversation led to a description of the reading public in America, — of the intelligence and independence of our working-people, of their habits of life and of thought, about which Buckle manifested great interest, asking many intelligent questions.

Mr. Buckle is in easy circumstances, and attends personally to the management of his money. He finds no difficulty in letting it upon first-class mortgages, at five per cent., and does not expect a higher rate of interest.

February 13th. To-night there was a religious celebration, including an illumination, in the mosque at the Citadel. We had expected to go and see it; and Mr. T. had invited Mr. B. and his party, as well as Mr. Buckle, and the two lads by whom he is accompanied in his jour neyings, to go with us. These young gentlemen are sons of a dear friend of Mr. Buckle's, no longer living.

But at the last moment before dinner

the advice was strongly given on all sides that we should not go, lest some bigoted Mussulmans should take offence, and there might be a disturbance. Not long ago, a party of Englishmen behaved very badly in the mosque on a similar occasion, from which has resulted a disturbed state of feeling. It of course cannot be pleasant to people of any religious belief to have their ceremonies made a spectacle for curiosity; and although the moudier (mayor of the city) promised ample protection, the plan was given up, and the company being gathered, we had a pleasant evening together. The presence of the ladies of Mr. B.'s party gave the opportunity to see Mr. Buckle again under the inspiration of ladies' society, which he especially enjoys, and in the lighter conversation suited to which he shines with not less distinction than when conversing upon abstruse topics.

In the course of the evening, in the midst of conversation in which he was taking an animated part, Mr. Buckle exhibited symptoms of faintness. Fresh air was at once admitted to the room, which was full of cigar-smoke; water and more powerful restoratives were brought, but these he declined. After a few minutes' repose upon the divan, he declared that he was perfectly recovered, and half an hour afterwards took his leave with the boys. We were quite

anxious until we heard that he had safely reached his boat, in which he is still living.

February 14th. Returning from the Turkish bath, I found a valentine in the shape of a telegraphic despatch only thirteen days from Boston,-thirty-six hours from Liverpool. It was dated at Boston the 1st, forwarded from Liverpool at 10 A. M. of the 13th, and reached Alexandria at 11.55 A. M. of the 14th, whence it was transmitted to Cairo without delay. This is almost equal to the Arabian Nights. The distance travelled by the despatch is about six thousand miles.

February 15th. This day we had an excursion to the Petrified Forest. It was

In

Mr.

got up partly to give us all a taste of camel-riding, and it was originally expected that everybody would go on camels; then it was agreed that half should go on camels, and "ride-and-tie." this view, one camel and one donkey were ordered for T. and myself. But Mr. B. was subsequently persuaded that with four horses he could have a carriage dragged through the desert to the forest, which would be more comfortable for the ladies; and he made that arrangement in his own and their behalf. Freddy B. is a first-rate horseman, and an Arab steed was ordered for him. Buckle was determined to go in a thing called a mazetta, a sort of huge bedstead with curtains, borne on the back of a camel, big enough to carry a small family, in which he expected to find room for himself and the two boys travelling with him. Besides these, the party included the Reverend Mr. Lansing, the excellent head of the American mission here, the Honorable W. S., a young Englishman, and his tutor, the Reverend Mr. S., whose agreeable company had been bespoken when the camel-project was in full strength.

On looking down from the balcony at the transportation-train marshalled for the occasion, amid the admiring gaze of all the idlers of Cairo, I was at first a little chagrined to find, as the final result of the various arrangements, that, besides the camels, the mazetta, the carriageand-four, and the proud-stepping horse, there appeared but one donkey, that selected for me. But I was, in truth, very well off. To begin with, it was not thought prudent that Mr. Buckle should use the mazetta until the procession had got beyond the narrow streets of Cairo, lest the camel bearing it should take fright and knock the whole thing to pieces against the wall of a house. Accordingly, he and his charges took donkeys, and I rode off with them, at the head of the column. By-and-by Mr. Buckle changed to the conveyance originally proposed, but a very short experiment (literally, I suspect) sickened him of the

mazetta, whose motion is precisely that of a ship in a storm, and he sent back to the town for donkeys. At the next halt the ladies took him into the carriage, where he found himself, as he said, "in clover," and that was the end of his greatness in camel-riding. This remark, by the way, suggested a name (“ Clover") for our boat in our voyage up the Nile just afterwards; but patriotism prevailed, and we named her “Union.” It pretty soon appeared that the camel which T. was riding was young and frisky; the animal was accordingly pronounced unsafe, and T. changed to a donkey which had fortunately been brought along for a reserve. The Honorable W. S.'s camel, from the saddle becoming unfastened, pitched rider and saddle to the ground, a fall of five or six feet: fortunately no harm was done, and he bravely mounted again. The saddle upon the Icamel which the Reverend Mr. S. rode split in two, and the seat must have been a torture; but he bore it like a martyr, never flinching. But camel-stock had so far depreciated, and donkeys gone up, that I was able to try as much as I liked of camel-riding now and then, at the same time obliging a friend by the use of my donkey meanwhile. Riding a camel at a walk is the same sort of thing as riding a very hard-trotting horse without stirrups, and with no chance to grasp the animal fair to hold your seat. When the camel s, you may imagine yourself on a treadmill.

The journey to the forest, about ten miles, was safely accomplished. We found the petrifactions duly wonderful. An excellent luncheon was laid out, after which we had an hour and a half of very entertaining conversation, in which Mr. Buckle and Rev. Mr. S. held the

ading parts,-all around us as desolate and silent as one could imagine. It was interesting to observe the manner in which Buckle estimated eminent names, grouping them in some instances by threes, a favorite conceit with him. John Stuart Mill, of all living men, he considers as possessing the greatest mind in the

world.

Aristotle, Newton, and Shakspeare are the greatest the world has produced in past times. Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare are the only three great poets. Johnson, Gibbon, and Parr are the three writers who have done the greatest harm to the English language. Of Hallam he has a strong admiration. He spoke of Sydney Smith as the greatest English wit, and of Selwyn as next to him, and described Macaulay's memory as unequalled in conversation.

For the return-trip, the donkeys generally were preferred. Miss B., with spirit, tried camel-riding for a while, and so did Master F. We stopped to look at the tombs of the Caliphs, and reached the hotel at nightfall, somewhat fatigued, but satisfied with the day's expedition.

February 16th. The morning was gratefully devoted to rest. In the afternoon, attended service at the Mission, where Rev. Mr. S. preached an interesting discourse from John xv. 1-4. On the way home met Mr. Buckle, who came in, and was persuaded to stay to dinner. In speaking of religion, he said that there is no doctrine or truth in Christianity that had not been announced before, but that Christianity is by far the noblest religion in existence. The chief point of its superiority is the prominence it gives to the humane and philanthropic element; and in giving this prominence lies its originality e believes in a Great First Cause, bubes not arrive at his belief by any process of reasoning satisfactory to himself. Paley's argument, from the evidence of design, he regards as futile: if the beauty of this world indicates a creating cause, the beauty of that great cause would suggest another, and so on. He believes in a future state, and declared most im pressively that life would be insupport able to him, if he thought he were forever to be separated from one person, alluding, it is probable, to his mother, to whose memory he dedicates the second volume of his book. He has no doubt

The words he uses are,- "To the memory of my mother I consecrate this volume."

that in the future state we shall recognize one another; whether we shall have the same bodies he has no opinion, although he regards matter as indestructible. He declares himself unable to form any judgment as to the mode of future existence. Religion, he says, is on the increase in the world, but theology is declining.

Mr. Buckle characterized as the sublimest passage in Shakspeare the lines in the "Merchant of Venice,”

"Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!
There's not the smallest orb which thou
behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims:
Such harmony is in immortal souls!
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Mr. Thayer suggested the similarity between the closing part of this passage, about our deafness to the music of the stars, owing to the "muddy vesture," and the sonnet of Blanco White which speaks of the starry splendors to which our eyes are blinded by the light of day:

of Blanco White's memoirs as painfully interesting, and said that he had always liked Archbishop Whately for adhering to White after the desertion of the latter by old friends on account of his change of belief.

The next few days were occupied in preparations for the voyage up the Nile

in

company with my New York friends. Mr. Buckle had very kindly taken great interest in our plans, and had earnestly advised me to go. "You will do very wrong indeed," he said, "if you do not go." On the 19th of February we embarked; and as we saluted his boat, lying just below us in the Nile, while our own shoved off, I little thought that I should never see him again, that his brilliant career was so shortly to come to an untimely end. The serious conversation just recorded was the last in which I took part with him.

Mr. Buckle remained in Cairo until the beginning of March, when he set out with the two boys, and Mr. J. S. Stuart Glennie, across the Desert, for Sinai and Petra. Greatly improved in health by the six weeks in the Desert, (according to Mr. Glennie's letter,) he undertook the more fatiguing travelling on horseback through Palestine. He fell ill on the 27th of April, but recovered his health, as it seemed, to such an extent that Mr. Glennie parted from him on the 21st of May. On the 29th of May, at Damascus, Mr. Buckle died. Among the incoherent utterances of his illness, it was possible to distinguish the exclamation, "Oh, my book, my book, I shall never finish my book!"

And beyond the grief felt in the loss of the kind friend and agreeable companion, our plaint, in common with the whole world, ever must be, that he did not live to finish his book.

WE have reached a point in the history of our national troubles where it seems desirable to examine our present position, and to consider whether we ought to surrender ourselves to despair, or congratulate ourselves on decided success, whether we should abandon all attempts to restore the Union, assert the dignity of the Constitution, and punish treason, or nerve ourselves to new effort, and determine to persevere in a righteous cause so long as a single able-bodied man remains or a dollar. of available property is unexpended.

It may be, it must be, conceded that we commenced the contest with very crude and inadequate notions of what war really is. We proposed to decide the issue by appealing to the census and the tax-list, tribunals naturally enough occurring to a mercantile and manufacturing community, but how if the enemy prefer cannon and cold steel? Our first campaign was in the field of statistics, and we found the results highly satisfactory. Our great numerical superiority, aided by our immense material resources, gave us an early and an easy victory. We outnumbered the enemy everywhere, defeated them in every pitched battle, starved them by a vigilant blockade, secured meanwhile the sympathy and support of the whole civilized world by the holiness of our cause, and commanded its respect by the display of our material power and our military capacity, and in a few short months crushed the Rebellion, restored the Union, vindicated the Constitution, hung the arch-traitors, and saw peace in all our borders. This was our campaign-on paper. But war is something more than a sum in arithmetic. A campaign cannot be decided by the rule of three. No finite power can control every contingency, and have all the chances in its favor.

A Moorish legend, given to us in the graceful narrative of Washington Irving,

relates, that an Arabian astrologer constructed for the pacific Aben Hafuz, King of Granada, a magical mode of repulsing all invaders without risking the lives of his subjects or diminishing the contents of the royal treasury. He caused a tower to be built, in the upper part of which was a circular hall with windows looking towards every point of the compass, and before each window a table supporting a mimic army of horse and foot. On the top of the tower was a bronze figure of a Moorish horseman, fixed on a pivot, with elevated lance. Whenever a foe was at hand, the figure would turn in that direction, and level his lance as if for action. No sooner was it reported to the vigilant monarch that the magic horseman indicated the approach of an enemy, than His Majesty hastened to the circular hall, selected the table at the point of the compass indicated by the horseman's spear, touched with the point of a magic lance some of the pigmy effigies before him, and belabored others with the butt-end.

A

scene of confusion at once ensued in the mimic army. Part fell dead, and the rest, turning their weapons upon each other, fought with the utmost fury. The same scene was repeated in the ranks of the advancing enemy. Each renewed attempt at invasion was foiled by this easy and economical expedient, until the King enjoyed rest even from rumors of wars.

Now this is a pleasing fiction, and highly creditable to the light and airy fancy of the Moors. It almost makes one sigh that an astrologer so fertile in resources is not still extant. It is difficult to conceive, indeed, of a more felicitous arrangement for a monarch devoted to his ease, and proof against all temptations to military glory, or for a people wedded to peaceful pursuits, and ambitious only of material prosperity. But no such fascinating substitute for fields of carnage is available in our degenerate