only conducted by the canal to Suez, but sent also, by means of iron pipes, northward to Port Sayd, to supply that rising town. The soil around Ismailyeh appears to be excellent, and to want fresh water only to enable it to produce anything and everything.

From Port Sayd to Ismailyeh, communication is now daily carried on by means of small steamers on the saltwater canal, and from Ismailych to Suez, in the other direction, by means of small steamers also, on the fresh-water canal. The entire distance is accomplished in about twenty-four hours, but exertions are being made to render the transit more rapid, and it is said that the time will be reduced to sixteen hours.

The deepest cuttings in the canal are in the neighborhood of El Geish, north of Ismailyeh, and for five miles in that direction to Lake Beelah. In some parts the perpendicular depth here will be a hundred feet, when the canal is excavated to its full extent. At present there is a great deal more to be done before it becomes fit for the passage of large vessels. South of Ismailyeh also, as far as Serapeum, there are some heavy and deep cuttings in progress, the work being peculiarly difficult when drift sands-hills have to be penetrated, as in this portion.

Where the land is very low, as in the excavations through Lakes Beelah and Menzaleh, the earth or sand excavated has been thrown down on either side to form firm and permanent banks; and in order to save time in the removal of the earth, long copper channels were fixed at an incline to the dredges, supported by props on a lighter alongside, and again, if necessary, on the bank. The earth fell from the scoops into the channels, and was conveyed at once a sufficient distance away from the water's edge.

The chief contractor, M. S. Vallée by name, has invented a new machine on a large scale, which does the work more effectually than the methods formerly in use, although it has not yet quite superseded them. It has one great advantage, that it is easily made available for a number of dredges. It is like a huge iron quadrant, strongly built, the outer edge of the segment of the circle being uppermost, the centre resting on a revolving bed. Along the

chord of the arc is placed a tramway, on which trucks are drawn by a strong wire rope. An engine is attached to the traversing bed to work the whole machinery. The machine can be turned round where it stands, or it can be transported to any distance required on rails on which it rests, and which can be brought into connection with others. The earth excavated by the dredges is then dropped into lighters having wooden cases prepared for the purpose, each about four feet square. When all have been filled, the lighter is taken alongside the emptying-machine, each case is lifted from the lighter, put on to the truck on the machine, carried along the tramway, and the contents shot out at the other end away from the canal. By this means a lighter may be emptied in a few minutes.

The original agreement between the government of Egypt and the canal company ceded to the latter in perpetuity a considerable tract of land on either side of the canal, and, when the fresh water was obtained from the Damietta branch of the Nile, the canal company proceeded forthwith to cultivate these tracts where possible. This interfered with the pacha's cotton and sugar monopoly. The English also were by no means pleased at the French company obtaining so much influence in Egypt, or so permanent a hold upon so large a tract of country, and upon so large a proportion of the population as promised ultimately to be settled there. Negotiations were, therefore, commenced two years ago, which ended in the pacha's purchasing the land capable of cultivation on both sides of the canal which was not requir ed by the company, for two millions of pounds sterling, and this supply of ready money has been most seasonable, for the exchequer of the canal company was nearly drained, whilst half the works remain to be completed. The freshwater canal was also ceded to the pacha,. and the narrow strip of land left to the company on each side of the canal is for the future to be used for building purposes and storehouses only, not for cultivation by means of the fellahs, or peasants.

There can be no doubt of the advan

tageous nature of this arrangement to both parties. The government of

The rapid improvement of all the towns leading to the canal in every direction, is one direct result of the operations already carried on. Zagazig, for instance, a few years ago, was a very ordinary Arab village, dirty, small, with a few mud huts, a few palm-trees, a few cattle, and a population of half-starved, diseased Arabs and Egyptians. "Nous avons changé tout cela !" the French may well exclaim. Good buildings have been erected where all, a few years ago, was tumble-down wretchedness and filthy squalor. Factories for pressing cotton and constructing simple machinery, mills for grinding corn and extracting oil, have been erected, and the town bears that busy, bustling aspect which denotes that its Oriental lethargy has well-nigh gone, and has been superseded by the energy of the West.

In Suez, too, the canal works have already effected a wonderful revolution. A magnificent dry dock has been constructed, and the most extensive dredging and breakwater-making operations are in progress. The dry dock is more than four hundred feet long and nearly a hundred broad, whilst large basins for the secure anchorage of ships and steamers are being formed in front of it. Steam power resounds on every side, on shore and on the water; the iron horse snorts, and pants, and labors incessantly. The new piers are being connected with the railway to Cairo, and with the town of Suez by branch lines of railway. The Egyptian government, shamed into activity by the gigantic works carried on by the canal company, is constructing piers and basins of its own at Suez, and what was, ten years ago, one of the laziest and filthiest of Eastern cities is now all life and energy, whilst the constant European supervision exercised over the works prevents the Arab and Egyptian

from indulging in their usual license for the accumulation of filth.

The completion of the canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea is, therefore, a question simply of time and money. There are no physical difficul ties yet to be encountered greater than those that have already been encountered and overcome. Immense sums of money have already been spent upon it, and immense sums must still be spent upon it, before it can be rendered fit to accomplish the intended purpose-that is, the transit of large vessels from sea to sea. to sea. Already goods can be conveyed from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and vice versa, by means of the freshwater canal from Suez to Ismailyeh, and of the grand canal from Ismailyeh to Port Sayd; but goods can also be conveyed from Suez to Alexandria more conveniently by rail, and more quickly too. The full purpose of the Grand Suez Canal will not be attained until large vessels are able to pass through it from end to end, so that steamers from Liverpool, London, Southampton, or Marseilles may pass on, without unloading in Egypt, through the Red Sea, to Bombay, or Galle, or Calcutta, or China, or Australia, as may be desired; and not till then can the canal become remunerative.

For sailing vessels it can never be made largely available, because the Red Sea is a long, narrow, gulf-like sea, subject to the monsoons, so that for one half the year sailing vessels could only sail up it, and for the other half of the year down it, without a ruinous loss of time caused by the incessant tacking necessary, and considerable danger.

Again, during the blowing of the khamsin, or the simoom, the canal will be liable, constantly liable, to have its works, its locks, etc., rendered temporarily useless by the deposit of large quantities of drift sand. Hedging back the sand by means of palisades on both sides of the canal may do something tow ard preventing its flowing or sinking into the body of the excavations, and the vegetation, encouraged on both sides of the embankment, may also do something toward preventing the drift sand being so troublesome as it might otherwise be; but the work will always be liable to great dangers from the nature

Describis vitam, moresque et dona Minervæ
Emulus illius, Mycalen qui natus ad altam
Rettulit Æolii vitam facundus Homeri.

Black, in his preface to his Life of Tasso, makes the following trite observations: "The life of Tasso is worthy of a long detail, not merely on account of his own eminence, but from the influence of his writings on the best of our own bards. Even to literary men, the Italian language is, in general, not, like the French, quite familiar; and, in spite of all that has been effected, much still remains to be done, before we shall have become sufficiently acquainted with the masters of the fathers of our poetry; yet, till this be done, we shall have a comparatively imperfect notion of the noblest production of English literature."

The influence of Tasso upon Milton is a subject for much interesting investiga tion. Manso was a warm admirer of Tasso, and doubtless, extolled his merits. The imagination of our great bard may have been fired by the fame achieved by the Italian poet. Whilst a guest in Manso's house, Tasso, at the request of his host's mother, commenced an epic poem, scarcely known in England, entitled The Creation. His aim was to sing in exalted verse the wonders of the seven days. In the fourth canto of the Jerusalem Delivered, Satan invokes a council to concert measures to help the infidels against the Christians. If we turn to the second book of Paradise Lost, we find a description of a council held by Satan. A comparison of the two is interesting.

In the ninth canto of Jerusalem Delivered, Tasso soars to the most daring description. When the battle between the Christians and Pagans is at its height, but undecided, the Creator sends for the Archangel Michael, and orders him to disperse the evil spirits who favor the infidels. Milton's description of the Deity, in the third book of Paradise Lost, is very similar. Dante shrank from describing the Almighty. Led by Beatrice, he is allowed a glimpse of the great mystery of the hypostatical union of Christ's human nature with his divine being. Spenser is supposed to have borrowed largely from Tasso; but it may with equal justness be said, that Ariosto and Tasso borrowed from Homer and Virgil. In addition to the Jerusalem Delivered,

Tasso wrote a poem entitled Rinaldo. The Valley of Despair, in the eleventh canto of Torquato's work, bears a remarkable similarity to the story of the Red-Cross Knight. The lion tamed by Clarillo, killed by Rinaldo, reminds us of the lion attending upon Una, slain by Sansloy.

We do not endorse all the Italian critic says respecting the origin of the Paradise Lost; but there can be no doubt that not only the Jerusalem, but also the Amadis of Gaul of Bernardo Tasso, and the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, exercised considerable influence upon the mind of our great epic poets.

The Cornhill Magazine.

THE RATIONALE OF RECREATION.

Ar this time of the year recreation is uppermost in the thoughts of nearly all classes. The farmer alone, looking over his fields as they spread their ripeness under the summer sun, thinks joyfully of work. For most of us harvest-time brings a different but still glorious fruition to the labors of the year. Our dreams at night are of the rest we have earned, and our thoughts by day are of mountain-tops, of rushing streams, and of the open sea. Into the dreary "chambers," these gleams of sunshine have made their way, bringing a message of the fields. The cosy study, such an attractive workshop in other seasons, looks dull and heavy now, and the backs of the books are persecuting in their too familiar aspect, for the sunshine which opens all the flowers shuts up these blossoms of the human tree. The roar of the street comes in through the open window with the distant whistle of the trains, and it suddenly strikes us how like the one is to the boom of the sea, and what a sound of country travel there is in the other. In society, too, the talk is of journeys, and even the children just home from school are full of thoughts of flight. A happy restlessness is on us; a peaceful flutter pervades the household

a quiet agitation makes itself manifest. There is a buzz of travel in the air, domestic and social life has a provisional character, and all the ties of society seem to be loosening. It is the holidays, and we are "breaking-up." Duty stands aside, care is content to

wait, routine is thrown gaily off, business and ambition put the yoke their shoulders, and even divinity assures itself that "there is a time to play."

Perhaps it may be true, as many a paterfamilias is saying, that holiday travel is, in the present day, pushed to an extreme. But there is the best and profoundest reason for a custom which has so thoroughly incorporated itself with modern civilization. There is in human nature a necessity for change; and the more intense is the life we live, the stronger and more imperious does that necessity become. The habits of a vegetable are only possible to those who vegetate, and a certain stolidity of mind and feebleness of character almost always characterize the vegetating portion of the race. It is the wonderful intellectual activity of the age which produces its restlessness. A highly developed nervous system is usually connected with a somewhat restless temperament; but the tendency of intellectual activity is to give an undue development to the nervous organization at the expense of the muscular tissues. In comparison with our great grandfathers, we are highly nervous, restless, and what they would have called "mercurial." The stress of nineteenth-century civilization is on the brain and the nerves; and one of the sad forms in which this fact becomes visible to the eye is the melancholy vastness of such establishments as those at Colney Hatch and Hanwell. Of course the very stress under which so many break down develops the power and capacity of vastly larger numbers than succumb to it; and if in the present day there is some diminution in the muscular development of the race, there is a more than corresponding increase in its nervous development and of all that depends thereon. Physical beauty, in so far as it depends on splendid muscular organizations, may not be as general among us as it was among the Greeks; but magnificent nervous organizations, with all the power of work which they confer, are more numerous among Englishmen and Americans to-day than they have ever been among any people whom the world has seen before. Our national temperament is in process of rapid development and change. The typical John Bull is fast becoming a merely legendary personage;

his vegetative life and stationary habits and local prejudices are all disappearing beneath the stimulating influences of railways and telegraphs and great cities. But this change of national temperament brings with it, and in part results from, an entire change of national habits and customs. English life in the eighteenth century was that of a nation who took the world easily,-in the nineteenth century it is that of a people who feel that "art is long and time is fleeting," and that life must be made the most of. From being what philosophers call extensive and running into physical developments, it has become intensive and takes intellectual forms. Our great grandfathers ate and drank, laughed and grew fat; we plan and study, labor and fret, and are nervous and thin. They took life as it came: we are more anxious to mould it to our purpose, and make it what we think it ought to be. They were content with news when it had already become history; we want to watch the history of this generation in the very process of making. They lived a life which was self-contained and satisfied; we are greedy of information, anxious for conquest, determined to acquire. Their times are typified by the pillion and the pack-horse; ours by the telegraph and the train. The same figure aptly typifies the relative wear and tear of the two modes of life. Theirs ambled along with an almost restful movement; ours rushes along at high pressure, with fearful wear and noise. Their work was almost play compared with ours; business of all kinds was steadier and quieter, politics were less exacting and exhausting, literature was rather a pursuit than a profession, and even divinity was duller. It may be that our pleasures are more refined than theirs were, but they are of a more exciting character; we take them in a busier and more bustling way, and tire of them sooner. Hence our greater need of change of scene and surrounding. Travel was only a luxury to them, but it has become a necessity to us. It is not merely fashion that sends us all from home, for the fashion itself has originated in an intellectual and physical need. The condition of animal life is movement. Little children are perpetually active, and the form of their activity is perpet