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in Parma and Modena, Bologna and Tuscany; the need of keeping what had been gained, and at the same time reaching forth for more; of keeping on good terms with France, who had drawn back almost as far as she first advanced; of remaining free, especially, from the reproach of meddling with the papacy—an enterprise for which the occasion was not ripe; of stimulating England, who had advanced in proportion as France withdrew; and of being supremely careful, generally, to commit no faults. The cession of Savoy and Nice brought down upon Cavour a storm of denunciation, but he had counted the cost, and the resolution with which he paid the price of Napoleon's assistance was extremely characteristic of him. It was apparently equally characteristic of Garibaldi, born at Nice and her most illustrious son, that he felt it a mortal affront that by this diplomatic bargain he should have been "deprived of a country." M. de Mazade characterizes very happily Cavour's attitude during Garibaldi's invasion of the Two Sicilies—his silent complicity, his skill in giving his terrible associate rope, as it were, and yet keeping him in hand. Cavour did not live to see the last two acts of his great drama—the occupation of Venetia and of Rome—but they were only, as it were, the epilogue: they were implied in what had gone before. He died of overwork—broke down in the midst of his labors. Great innovator as he had been, he was remarkable for the moderation of his attitude toward the Church; and the last words he uttered to the good friar who attended his deathbed were a repetition of his famous formula—"Libera chiesa in libero stato."

Egypt as it Is. By J. C. McCoan. York: Henry Holt & Co.

During the three quarters of a century which have elapsed since the French invasion a voluminous Egyptian library has been built up, but it is almost wholly scientific, sentimental or "entertaining." Of the antiquities and the natural history of the country, the temples, mummies and crocodiles, and the humors of Fellah-life, we have been told a great deal. An account of the condition and prospects of the country from an economic point of view has remained a desideratum. This seems the less remarkable when we recall the fluctuations through which the industry, commerce and politics of Egypt have passed since Mehemet Ali seized and commenced repolishing the sceptre of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. He and his four successors stood forth as the absolute lords of the land; but it was subject not only to the accidents of their character and policy, but to the capricious and almost always mischievous interference of their suzerain the Porte, and the often beneficial, but never quite disinterested, control of the great Christian powers.

The progress of the past fourteen years has been more palpable than that of the preceding half century. The khedive Ismaïl succeeded the reactionary Abbas, who stopped, and, as far as in him lay, nullified, the work of Mehemet in 1865. Since that year 971 out of 1126 miles of railway have been built; three or four hundred miles of telegraph have grown to fifty-five hundred; 112 miles of canal have been dug, and a great part of the old system deepened or restored; the great Suez Canal, additional to that, has been undertaken and completed at a net cost to Egypt of sixty-seven millions of dollars; the barrage, or damming for irrigation purposes, of the Lower Nile has been pushed at a cost of five millions; ten millions have been spent on the harbor of Alexandria, one upon light-houses, which make the coast as safe as that of any European power, and half a million on the bridge at Cairo; schools have been multiplied, remodelled and endowed in like proportion; the judiciary has been recast with the best results, so far as time has permitted them to be shown; and the exports, excluding the transit-trade, which the opening of the Isthmus Canal has diverted from Alexandria, raised from twenty-four millions in 1866 to sixty-three millions in 1875. The cotton production, created about the beginning of the present reign by the civil war in the United States, shows a recovery and re-advance since the loss of that stimulus, shipments from Alexandria having grown from 1,288,797 quintals in 1866 to 2,615,120 in 1875. The blow dealt the commerce of that city by the transfer of the Indian trade to Port Said has similarly been "discounted," the mercantile sagacity of Alexander the Great continuing to assert itself in a movement of business and population which cannot fail to be largely aided by the extension of the arable area of Egypt proper and the railway development of Nubia and the Soudan. The population of the first of these three districts has grown to five and a half millions, or 484 to the square mile—a