fresh layer of rich deposit; then the lands are put under cultivation; and during our winter months, which are, in fact, the spring months in Egypt, the Delta, as well as the valley of the Nile, looks like a delightful garden, teeming with verdure and beautiful with the blossoms of trees and plants. It very seldom rains at Cairo, probably not more than three or four times in the year. Dr. Abbot records a few drops of rain on December 26; slight rain, January 25; heavy rain, January 30; a few drops, February 9 and 16; and a few drops, March 6 and 14. The thermometer, on the average, in the month of December, ranges from 560 to 64° at 9 A.M., and from 68° to 77° in the afternoon. In January, 52° to 69°, and 64° to 79°. In February, 56° to 69°, and 65° to 75°. In March, 60° to 76°, and 60° to 78°.

The romance of travel in Egypt is, however, fast disappearing. A new bridge has been recently built by the Khedive over the Nile, so that travellers can now go direct in carriages from their hotel to the Pyramids without being obliged, as formerly, to cross the river in boats, and finish the excursion on camels or donkeys. The old 'Dahabeah,' or Nile boat, is giving way to the comparatively luxurious Nile steamer; and the charms of that dreamy Epicurean life, floating up and down the great river, will soon become a memory of the past. No more encampments beneath the myriad stars and the wondrous sky of an Egyptian night, amidst the labyrinth of pillars, obelisks, and fallen temples of Luxor or Karnak. Instead of, as heretofore, passing the night on land under a tent, the traveller now sleeps in his comfortable berth on board the Khedive's steamer, and does' the Nile in three weeks instead of three months, as in the palmy days of the Dahabeahs. During the winter of 1871, before the steamers began to ply, the price asked for a first-class boat was from 90l. to 120l. a month, for three or four months; while now the voyage-585 miles from Cairo to Philæ, a few miles above the first Cataract, and back again, can be made, by the aid of Messrs. Cook & Son, who are exclusive agents for the passenger steamers on the Nile belonging to the Khédive Administration, at a cost of 441., including steamer, living, guides, and all other necessary expenses. Of course, those who have plenty of time and money at their disposal can have no difficulty in obtaining Dahabeahs, if they prefer that mode of locomotion; but to such as are limited in these respects, the steamers will be found more convenient. The latter are small, carrying from fourteen to seventeen passengers, and stop at all the places worth seeing between Cairo and the first Cataract, viz. Beni-Swaif, Minyeh, Beni-Hassan, Syout, Girgeh, Kench, Luxor, Karnak, Esneh, Edfou, KoamEmbou, and Assuan. A day and a half is spent at Assuan and Phile, and three days at Luxor and Karnak.

My readers would not, I am certain, thank me for a description

6

of Cairo, its squares, streets, mosques, and bazaars; for has not each remarkable spot in this famed Arab city been done' over and over again by book-making travellers of every stamp? Has not every one, too, gazed in imagination on the Sphinx, and ascended the great Pyramid, that covers an area equal to the entire of Lincoln's-inn-fields, and is one-third higher than the ball of St. Paul's? Have not the Ghawazees, or dancing-girls, of Esneh been pictured in glowing words and painted on undying canvas? and have not the wonders of Thebes, the city with a hundred gates,' and all the temples, colossi, sphinxes, obelisks, and tombs of Luxor, Karnak, Phil, Syout, Abydos, and Dendera been made familiar by the works of Heeren, Lepsius, Kenrick, Wilkinson, and Gliddon? The accompanying engraving pictures a phase of Egyptian scenery which those who have visited Luxor and Karnak will not fail to recognise. My object, however, is not to describe the scenery of the Nile, but simply to direct attention to the climatic advantages of Egypt, and to Cairo, the city of the Khédive, as a suitable winter residence.

'HE is dead, and has left nothing in this world that resembles him.' These words, spoken by Sir Philip Francis at the close of his laudation of the elder Pitt, may fairly be applied to that great man who died on the eighteenth of January last, after a literary career extending over nearly half a century, during which he gave to the world labours more various and brilliant than were ever achieved by any writer except Voltaire; while in the highest range of art, in the poetic and imaginative, he must be admitted to have infinitely surpassed Voltaire. With Lord Lytton expires the art of the romancer. The mantle of Sir Walter Scott, which descended directly upon him, may now enfold his quiet dust in the gray gloom of St. Edmund's Chapel; for assuredly there is none other to assume that royal purple.

Romance writing, as an art distinct from poetry, appears to be now extinct; and the photographic faculty, or the art of reflecting actual life exactly as it is, alone remains. There is no living writer who could create an Edgar Ravenswood, a Lucy Ashton, a Devereux, or a Zanoni; or any one figure in that long line of images, all radiant with the light of a poetic mind. Indeed, could such a conception arise in the brain of a modern novelist, he would most likely reject the poetic image as high-flown and unnatural, not having within him the stuff wherewith to fashion to completeness such an embryo, or a fancy strong enough to give it life.

The atmosphere we breathe in the novels of Scott and Bulwer is the atmosphere of romance. Before you have read a couple of chapters you are in a new world; yet nothing seems unreal; the characters are living men and women, but they live in another world than ours. They are of that grander stature which the painter calls the heroic.

It is curious to consider that when Edward Lytton Bulwer first surprised the world with Pelham, Scott still reigned at Abbotsford,

the chief luminary of the world of letters. But two years earlier, wreck and ruin had come upon that splendid life, to be met, perhaps, more heroically than ever calamity was encountered since the days of Themistocles. The wizard of the North sat among his household gods-his oak carvings, rescued from Scottish abbeys; his coats of mail; his gothic ceilings in carton-pierre; and, knowing not how soon he might be bidden to depart from them for ever, wrote on, with cheerful unflagging zeal, eager, despite advancing years and fastdeclining health, to redeem his fortunes and his honour, and wipe off a hundred thousand pounds of debt with the contents of his inkbottle.

To Bulwer it was given never to write for daily bread. He was the ideal romancer, whose Pegasus was never goaded into labour by poverty's stinging lash. From his very boyhood he was an artist, far more consciously and deliberately artistic than Scott ever was. He was indeed, from the beginning, a thinker, which Scott was not. In Scott the creative and reproductive faculty seemed to be a God-given power, which required no cultivation-the soil fertile as those virgin cotton fields which need neither plough nor manure. In all Scott's letters and diaries there is no hint of his ever having thought of his art as an art, not the faintest indication of those laborious days and nights which Dickens-as revealed to us by Mr. Forsterappears to have given to the composition of a novel. Scott wrote as the birds sing. The art of concealing art was unnecessary to him. He had no art to conceal. With Bulwer it was otherwise. He was not content to take his genius as he found it, like Scott, but set himself sedulously to the work of self-culture. His education seems to have begun afresh when he left the University. His own words in one of the prefaces to Pelham, written for the edition of 1835, best describe his earnestness, and are worthy to be remembered by every writer who desires to be an artist:

For the formation of my story I studied with no slight attention the great works of my predecessors, and attempted to derive from that study certain rules and canons to serve me as a guide; and, if some of my younger contemporaries, whom I could name, would only condescend to take the same preliminary pains that I did, I am sure that the result would be much more brilliant. It often happens to me to be consulted by persons about to attempt fiction, and I invariably find that they imagine they have only to sit down and write. They forget that art does not come by inspiration, and that the novelist, dealing constantly with contrast and effect, must, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, study to be an artist. They paint pictures for posterity without having learned to draw.

In the same preface the author describes the reception of this his first important work-for Falkland can be considered only

a boyish effort-how, as in the case of Vanity Fair, the publisher's 'reader' pronounced the most unfavourable and damning opinion upon its chances of success-an opinion fortunately reversed by Mr. Ollier, the able and ingenious author of Mesilla, to whom it was then referred. The book was published,' continues the anthor, and I may add that for about two months it appeared in a fair way of perishing prematurely in its cradle. With the exception of two most flattering and generously-indulgent notices in the Literary Gazette and the Examiner, and a very encouraging and friendly criticism in the Atlas, it was received by the critics with indifference or abuse. They mistook its purport, and translated its satire literally. But about the third month it rose rapidly in the favour it has since continued to maintain.'

Towards the conclusion of the same preface he adds :

'I knew not a single critic, and scarcely a single author, when I began to write. I have never received to this day* a single word of encouragement from any of those writers who were considered at one time the dispensers of reputation. Long after my name was not quite unknown in every other country where English literature is received, the great quarterly journals of my own disdained to recognise my existence.'

It would have been strange indeed if such a book as Pelham should have long failed to attract the public, however roughly handled by the critics, with their natural aversion from novelty, and innate unwillingness to recognise a new planet in the literary heaven. Surely altogether the most wonderful book ever written at threeand-twenty. The sparkle of its wit, the richness of its humour, the keen edge of its worldly wisdom, are as fresh to-day as when the story was written; and Pelham, trifler and boy as he may be, charms and delights us still. We excuse his long curls and his velvetcollar, his dancing lessons and his amours after the manner of Le Sage, for the sake of a vivacity that never tires, sustained by shrewdness and common sense that fill us with wonder at his creator's knowledge of the world and the human heart. The book overflows with good things. Every other page sparkles with an epigram. Pelham is Chesterfield put into action, but with a life and gaiety that Chesterfield never could have had. He is more French, however, than English; and one fancies the sources of his author's inspiration, at this stage, were for the most part continental. His morals, like the mille fleurs on his handkerchiefs, have a perfume of the Regency, and are only above the Le Sage and Fielding standard in so far as they are more aristocratic. He fights a duel with a Parisian tradesman from a somewhat quixotic idea of honour, but is not

1835. He had at this time written The Disowned, Devereux, Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram, England and the English, The Student, Pilgrims of the Rhine, Last Days of Pompeii, and Rienzi.