quarrel with the people of America, but at quarrel with them never were. These and a thousand other foolish things she did in order to surround by a brazen wall an English Variant that, as yet, was as "aerial" in his essence as Queen Mary's own imaginary babe.

But, as I have said, there is nothing in the world so short-sighted as selfishness ungoverned by conscience nothing in the world so sure to defeat itself in the end. If it is humorous to think that the selfish stealing of Corsica, which (poisoning the blood of France with Napoleon) led on to the corruptions of the Napoleonic courts, and thence to a sterility that is withdrawing her from her place in the forefront of the world-if it is humorous to think that it was the selfishness of a dominant party in England that lost her the American colonies-what shall we say of the selfish desire of America to build around her imaginary offspring a wall of brass by cheating the devil while the devil was cheating her? The same smartness which compelled her to go on squeezing between the lips of her own children the sour and poisonous whey conveyed in her school-books impelled her also to go on despoiling her slandered mother of all the rich milk she could supply. While the school-books told the children that England was a poor effete little old island, filled by rogues whom even Providence could only prevent being mischievous by providing that they should also be fools, she carefully stole her own mother's Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, Trollope, Besant, Hardy, Black, and the rest, whose every rich and noble word gave the lie to every slanderous word that the school-books contained. She took it for granted, as Margaret Fuller well put it, that, because the United States printed and read more books, magazines, and newspapers than all the rest of the world, they had really, therefore, a liter. ature.' She took it for granted that the literary genius of Great Britain "darting as De Tocquevile says, "into the forests of the New World," could foster a literature that was other than British, and went on, like Tennyson's Mary, with her maternal preans about a babe that had not as yet even a sooterkin's existence

its rays,

"He hath awaked! he hath awaked! He stirs within the darkness! . . .

The second Prince of Peace,

The great unborn defender of the Faith,
Who will avenge me of mine enemies-
He comes and my star rises."

And now, what was the measure of success won by this method of slandering the mother country, and robbing her at the same time? It set working a mischief in America itself, which is as yet only in the bud. It is one of the causes which are hopelessly dividing the cultivated class of America from the most prejudiced and narrow-minded class in the civilized world -America's illiterate mob. For, while the whole of the masses, and the larger portion of the bourgeois class, lacking the opportunity of enlightenment which their superiors possess, continue to accept the fantastic falsehoods they imbibed at school, the better classes soon begin to study our contemporary literature with intelligent eyes, and become filled with an irresistible longing to visit the country which produced it. This fact is, of course, fatal to the architecture of the brazen wall the mob demands. The hearty, smiling personage standing on this side of the Atlantic ferry" with open arms to receive the American visitor, is none other than the hateful John Bull depicted in the school-books. sooner does an American reach London than he finds that his mere nationality acts as a charm-acts as a letter of introduction into the best society where he is fitted to move. There are certain American writers, I believe, who enlarge upon what they call "Anglo-mania" in America, but, clearly, the mania of loving-kindness between the two countries is all on one side of the Atlantic. In London it is better to be an American than an Englishman. Nothing is more common than to find as a postscript appended to an invitation to a dinner or a garden-party the persuasive words, "Some interesting Americans are expected."

No

Fascinating as is the personality of Mr. Lowell, he did not exaggerate in the smallest degree when he affirmed that the cordiality of his reception here was due to the fact of his being an American almost more than to the fact of his being Mr. Lowell.

But what about the poor homespun vulgarian left on the other side of the water? What about him who has never had an opportunity of unlearning the sour hatred

From this he proceeds to look with suspicion upon the cultivated class to which the prominent personage belongs. And when we remember that it is this very homespun vulgarian of America under whose feet the neck of American culture lies, we may well fear that mischief looms this way.

One of the fruits of America's ill-advised attitude toward England is to be seen in the nature of the Copyright Act itself. That the leading men in American letters, beaded by Mr. Lowell, Mr. Stedman, Mr. Winter, Mr. Moncure Conway, and others, were guided by the motives of scholars and gentlemen in all they said and did with regard to this Act, no one can doubt who has the privilege of a personal acquaintance with them. But alas! our friend the "American patriot" could not be made to unlearn his lesson that to despoil England as well as to hate her, is America's sacred duty.

To suppose that a Copyright Bill such as these eminent and high-minded writers wanted had a chance of passing, was to display a noble Quixotism into which but very few English authors ever passed.

To proclaim that the Bill was intended to do justice to the British author, who for generations has been despoiled, was— alas for these gentlemen a very poor way of recommending it to a people reared on American traditions. In order to insure its passing in any form, it was necessary that the class that is playing ducks and drakes not only with the honor of America, but with her very existence as a civilized community, should be told that the Bill was a protective measure; first for the working printers, papermakers, and binders of America; secondly for the master printers, papermakers, and binders of America; thirdly for the poor defrauded authors of America, whose genius has been swamped by cruel English invaders ever since the day's NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIV., No. 1.

of Washington; and lastly for the poor defrauded Variant who, being now fully born, demanded to be fed and fostered upon sprouts from his native soil. For although the raw, untutored and untravelled American may be guided by mercenary motives in most things, he has still one sentiment or rather passion-that hatred of England which he imbibed at school.

Whatsoever was generous or even approached generosity in the Bill had to be carefully neutralized before it had the remotest chance of passing, and now it is a monument of the meanness and the greed of a people who ought to be great-a monument only less colossal and only less grotesque than the astounding McKinley Act itself.

There was once a certain Irishman-a patriot, I believe-named Patrick Hogan, who, on being warned that his sow would certainly devour her litter as soon as they were born, said, "Faix, an' if she does eat 'em, I'll jis lock her up in a sty by herself." George Borrow told me this story during a delightful ramble, sniffing the while, as was his wont, the summer wind as it drew the honey-scents from the gorse-flowers of Wimbledon Common. "And," said he, in his quaint Norfolk accent, although Pat, the moment she had et up the pegs, locked away the sow in another sty, he did not succeed in sav-ing one."

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Are the Americans a little late-a century too late, say-in passing an Act to. protect their literature? Would not the July after the birth of the Republic havebeen a better date for such an Act to be-gin its work than the July of 1891 ? In. treating of America as the great modern. architect of brazen walls, will history have to draw the same lesson from the Copyright Act as she draws from the famous plot of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay to build their brazen wall around England by cheating the devil? While the two magicians lay dozing and dreaming of success, the Brazen Head, by whose means alone the wall could be built, exclaimed "Time is;" then after a while, "Time was;" then, "Time is past;" and finally, hurling itself on the floor of the cell in a noise of thunder and a smell of sulphur, ruined the necromancers' plot altogether. By making men forget that in all human matters there are the same three periods,.

the devil generally contrives to win the game.

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If, in the beginning of their Republic, the Americans bad been less smart-if they had dealt like honorable gentlemen with English writers, thereby protecting their own literary growths as they are at last by this Act trying to protect them, what effect would this have had upon the planting and fostering of the national literature they crave? Suppose that the young American had been developed, not only by means of numberless vegetables in season," but also by the sprouts and flowers of America's own literary growth; suppose that, at the founding of the Republic, a rigid Copyright Act had been passed, not only in order to do justice to England, but also in order to save their own markets from being destroyed by that same injustice, would this act of honesty have so protected the literary growths of America that they would have furnished Europe not only with indigenous "pork" mentioned by Mr. Walt Whitman, but also with the indigenous poetry that a century of effort has not enabled them to produce?

If it is the fact that the protective power of such an Act operating upon the intellectual forces of the community during its most plastic stages of growth would have given America a literature which could properly have been called American, if it would really have turned a colonial poetry into a national one-then the story of America is but another illustration of the great truth that nothing is strong but justice and fair dealing. But

whether or not this would have been the case, I for one-I, who among Americans number some of my dearest friends-do not and cannot regret it; do not and cannot regret that English poetry is henceforth forever to be strengthened and enriched by American genius, and that no American can write poetry without being, for the time that he is occupied with his art, as truly an Englishman as I am.

So full is America of every kind of Anglo-Saxon force, so full of literary as well as mechanical genius, that I believe the great English writers of the twentieth century may well be born on American soil; for I dissent entirely from the American lexicographer, Mr. J. R. Bartlett, when he says that "there is in the best authors and speakers of Great Britain a variety in the choice of expression, a correctness in the use of the particles, and an idiomatic vigor and raciness of style to which few American writers or none can attain," though he tells us that "the ripest scholars in America" share his views upon the point. And this I know, that should it actually occur that the leading English writers of the twentieth century are born upon American soil, the greeting they will receive in the old home is foreshadowed as truly as pleasantly in the cordial reception that has already been given to writers like Washington Irving, Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Poe, Longfellow, Prescott, J. R. Lowell, Motley, Stedman, Wendell Holmes, Moncure Conway, and the rest.-Fortnightly Review.

SOME thousands of years ago, there was a city in Mesopotamia called Surippak. One night a strange dream came to a dweller therein, whose name, if rightly reported, was Hasisadra. The dream foretold the speedy coming of a great flood; and it warned Hasisadra to lose no time in building a ship, in which, when notice was given, he, his family and friends, with their domestic animals and a collection of the wild creatures and seed of plants of the land, might take refuge and be rescued

Hea, the pilot, was left alone on deck to do his best for the ship. Thereupon a hurricane began to rage; rain fell in torrents; the subterranean waters burst forth; a deluge swept over the land, and the wind lashed it into waves sky high; heaven and earth became mingled in chaotic gloom. For six days and seven nights the gale raged, but the good ship held out until, on the seventh day, the storm lulled. Hasisadra ventured on deck; and, seeing nothing but a waste of waters strewed with floating corpses and wreck, wept over the destruction of his land and people. Far away, the mountains of Nizir were visible; the ship was steered for them and ran aground upon the higher land. Yet another seven days passed by. On the seventh, Hasisadra sent forth a dove, which found no resting place and returned; then he liberated a swallow, which also came back; finally, a raven was let loose, and that sagacious bird, when it found that the waters had abated, came near the ship, but refused to return to it. Upon this, Hasisadra liberated the rest of the wild animals, which immediately dispersed in all directions, while he, with his family and friends, ascending a mountain hard by, offered sacrifices upon its summit to the gods.

The story thus given in summary abstract, told in an ancient Semitic dialect, is inscribed in cuneiform characters upon a tablet of burnt clay. Many thousands of such tablets, collected by Assurbanipal, King of Assyria in the middle of the seventh century B. C., were stored in the library of his palace at Nineveh; and, though in a sadly broken and mutilated condition, they have yielded a marvellous amount of information to the patient and sagacious labor which modern scholars have bestowed upon them. Among the multitude of documents of various kinds, this narrative of Hasisadra's adventure has been found in a tolerably complete state. But Assyriologists agree that it is only a copy of a much more ancient work; and there are weighty reasons for believing that the story of Hasisadra's flood was well known in Mesopotamia before the year 2000 B.C.

No doubt, then, we are in presence of a narrative which has all the authority which antiquity can confer; and it is proper to deal respectfully with it, even

though it is quite as proper, and indeed necessary, to act no less respectfully toward ourselves; and, before professing to put implicit faith in it, to inquire what claim it has to be regarded as a serious account of an historical event.

It is of no use to appeal to contemporary history, although the annals of Babylonia, no less than those of Egypt, go much further back than 2000 B.C. All that can be said is, that the former are hardly consistent with the supposition that any catastrophe, competent to destroy all the population, has befallen the land since civilization began, and that the latter are notoriously silent about deluges. In such a case as this, however, the silence of history does not leave the inquirer wholly at fault. Natural science has something to say when the phenomena of nature are in question. Natural science may be able to show, from the nature of the country, either that such an event as that described in the story is impossible, or at any rate highly improbable; or, on the other hand, that it is consonant with probability. the former case the narrative must be suspected or rejected; in the latter, no such summary verdict can be given on the contrary, it must be admitted that the story may be true. And then, if certain strangely prevalent canons of criticism are accepted, and if the evidence that an event might have happened is to be accepted as proof that it did happen, Assyriologists will be at liberty to congratulate one another on the "confirmation by modern science" of the authority of their ancient books.

In

It will be interesting, therefore, to inquire how far the physical structure and the other conditions of the region in which Surippak was situated are compatible with such a flood as is described in the Assyrian record.

The scene of Hasisadra's adventure is laid in the broad valley, six or seven hundred miles long, and hardly anywhere less than a hundred miles in width, which is traversed by the lower courses of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, and which is commonly known as the " Euphrates valley." Rising, at the one end, into a hill country, which gradually passes into the Alpine heights of Armenia; and, at the other, dipping beneath the shallow waters of the head of the Persian Gulf, which continues in the same direction, from northwest to

southeast, for some eight hundred miles further, the floor of the valley presents a gradual slope, from eight hundred feet above the sea level to the depths of the southern end of the Persian Gulf. The boundary between sea and land, formed by the extremest mudflats of the delta of the two rivers, is but vaguely defined; and, year by year, it advances seaward. On the northeastern side, the western frontier ranges of Persia rise abruptly to great heights on the southwestern side, a more gradual ascent leads to a table-land of less elevation, which, very broad in the south, where it is occupied by the deserts of Arabia and of Southern Syria, narrows, northward, into the highlands of Palestine, and is continued by the ranges of the Lebanon, the Antilebanon, and the Taurus, into the highlands of Armenia.

The wide and gently inclined plain, thus enclosed between the gulf and the highlands, on each side and at its upper extremity, is distinguishable into two regions of very different character, one of which lies north, and the other south of the parallel of Hit on the Euphrates. Except in the immediate vicinity of the river, the northern division is stony and scantily covered with vegetation, except in spring. Over the southern division, on the contrary, spreads a deep alluvial soil, in which even a pebble is rare; and which, though, under the existing misrule, mainly a waste of marsh and wilderness, needs only intelligent attention to become, as it was of old, the granary of western Asia. Except in the extreme south, the rainfall is small and the air dry. The heat in summer is intense, while bitterly cold northern blasts sweep the plain in winter. Whirlwinds are not uncommon; and, in the intervals of the periodical inundations, the fine, dry, powdery soil is swept even by moderate breezes into stifling clouds, or rather fogs, of dust. Low inequalities, elevations here and depressions there, diversify the surface of the alluvial region. The latter are occupied by enormous marshes, while the former support the permanent dwellings of the present scanty and miserable population.

In antiquity, so long as the canalization of the country was properly carried out, the fertility of the alluvial plain enabled great and prosperous nations to have their home in the Euphrates valley. Its abundaut clay furnished the materials for the

masses of sun-dried and burnt bricks, the remains of which, in the shape of huge artificial mounds, still testify to both the magnitude and the industry of the population thousands of years ago. Good cement is plentiful, while the bitumen which wells from the rocks at Hit and elsewhere, not only answers the same purpose, but is used to this day, as it was in Hasisadra's time, to pay the inside and the outside of boats.

The water of both

In the broad lower course of the Euphrates the stream rarely acquires a velocity of more than three miles an hour, while the lower Tigris attains double that rate inftimes of flood. great rivers is mainly derived from the northern and eastern highlands in Armenia and in Kurdistan, and stands at its lowest level in early autumn and in January. But when the snows accumulated in the upper basins of the great rivers, during the winter, melt under the hot sunshine of spring, they rapidly rise,* and at length overflow their banks, covering the alluvial plain with a vast inland sea, interrupted only by the higher ridges and hummocks which form islands in a seemingly boundless expanse of water.

In the occurrence of these annual inundations lies one of several resemblances between the valley of the Euphrates and that of the Nile. But there are important differences. The time of the annual flood is reversed, the Nile being highest in autumn and winter, and lowest in spring and early summer. The periodical overflows of the Nile, regulated by the great lake basins in the south, are usually punctual in arrival, gradual in growth, and beneficial in operation. No lakes are interposed between the mountain torrents of the upper basins of the Tigris and the Euphrates and their lower courses. Hence heavy rain, or an unusually rapid thaw in the uplands, gives rise to the sudden irruption of a vast volume of water which not even the rapid Tigris, still less its more sluggish companion, can carry off in time to prevent violent and dangerous overflows. Without an elaborate system of canalization, providing an escape for such sudden

* In May 1849 the Tigris at Bagdad rose 22+ feet-5 feet above its usual rise-and nearly swept away the town. In 1831 a similarly exceptional flood did immense damage, destroying 7000 houses. See Loftus, Chaldea and Susiana, p. 7.