the towns and villages of China proper. Thence she retraced her steps by Chengtu and Chialing, and floated down the Yangtze back to Shanghai.

The general idea conveyed by Mrs. Bishop's book confirms the impression that Szechuen is on the whole the most prosperous and wealthy province in China. Her description of the plain of Chengtu, with its population of four millions in an area of 2,500 square miles (1,600 to the square mile), and of its mode of irrigation, is full of interest. Two thousand years ago an engineer named Li Ping cut a channel 100 feet deep through a bed of solid rock, and diverted the waters of the River Min into thousands of minor channels which carry fertilising rivulets across this plain. On a temple erected to his memory there is inscribed, in letters of gold, the motto which he bequeathed for the guidance of his countrymen : 'Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low.' We must find room for one extract:

'With a faithfulness rare in China, Li Ping's motto has been carried out for twenty-one centuries. In March the bed of the artificial Min, which has been closed by a barrier since the previous November,... is carefully dug out till the workmen reach two iron cylinders sunk in the bed of the stream, which mark its proper level. The silt of the year, which is from five to six feet thick, is then removed. . . . In late March or early April there is a grand ceremony, sometimes attended by the Viceroy, when the winter dam is cut, and the strong torrent of the Min, seized upon by human skill, is divided and subdivided, twisted, curbed by dams and stone revetments, and is sent into innumerable canals and streams, till, aided by a fall of twelve feet to the mile, there is not a field which has not a continual supply, or an acre of the Chengtu plain in which the musical gurgle of the bright waters of the Tibetan uplands is not heard-waters so abundant that though drought may exist all round, this vast oasis remains a paradise of fertility and beauty.*

It is with regret that we infer from Mrs. Bishop's pages the wide prevalence of a strong anti-foreign feeling. This is all the more remarkable, because Mr. Little on his first trip up the Gorges found none of it. He particularly notices the absence of such opprobrious epithets as Foreign devil,' to which, unfortunately, we are only too well accustomed in provinces nearer the coast. Mrs. Bishop's experience was very different from that of Mr. Little. She rarely approached a city of any size without being greeted by some hostile demonstration of the kind, and at Liang-shan she barely escaped with her life. The recent growth of this anti-foreign feeling is in all

* The Yangtze Valley and Beyond,' p. 347.

probability due to the pernicious influence of the Hunan Tracts which were assiduously circulated some years ago by the society of which the notorious Chow Han was the moving spirit. It is an unpleasant element in the situation, which cannot be ignored, and which it is to be feared may yet cause us trouble in our dealings with the Yangtze Valley.

Mrs. Bishop's Concluding Remarks' sum up with great accuracy the political situation, and we are glad to find ourselves substantially in accord with the views expressed.

• Commercial and industrial energy is not decaying; the vast fleets of junks are not rotting in harbours; industry, thrift, resourcefulness, and the complete organisation both of labour and commerce meet the traveller at every turn.' On the other hand, the infamies of Chinese administration to-day have been rivetted upon China by centuries of political retrogression and the gradual lowering of the standard of public virtue in the absence of a wholesome public opinion.'

Mrs. Bishop, we think, takes too roseate a view of the possibilities of internal reform, but she admits that foreign aid is, in present circumstances, indispensable.

In this turmoil, and with the European nations thundering at her gates, it is impossible for China to attempt any reforms which would not from the nature of the case be piecemeal and superficial. The reform of an administration like hers needs the prolonged and careful consideration of the best minds in the Empire, with such skilled and disinterested foreign advice as was given by Sir Harry Parkes to Japan when she embarked on her new career. . . . China is certainly at the dawn of a new era. Whether the twentieth century shall place her where she ought to be, in the van of Oriental nations, or whether it shall witness her disintegration or decay, depends very largely on the statesmanship and influence of Great Britain.'

...

We tender to Mrs. Bishop our hearty congratulations on the successful completion of her work. It describes with admirable terseness and lucidity the salient features of the great region which has been recognised by China as our own particular sphere. Whatever the future may be, the magnitude of our interests in this area is undeniable, and an exact knowledge, not merely of its commercial capabilities, but of the character of the people with whom we have to deal, is essential, if we are to grapple successfully with the problem.

ART. II.-1. Ave Roma Immortalis.

Studies from the Chronicles

of Rome. By F. Marion Crawford. London and New York: Macmillan, 1898. 2. History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages. By Ferdinand Gregorovius. Translated from the Fourth German Edition by Annie Hamilton. London: Bell and Sons, 1894–98. 3. The Remains of Ancient Rome. By Prof. J. H. Middleton. Second Edition. London and Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1892.

4. Rome, the Pagan City. By John Dennie. Third Edition. New York: Putnam, 1896.

5. Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries. By R. A. Lanciani. London: Macmillan, 1888.

6. Pagan and Christian Rome. By R. A. Lanciani. London : Macmillan, 1892.

And other works.

WHE

HEN the Italian army entered Rome on September 20th, 1870, the Middle Ages came to an end. Straightway the new spirit began to make its presence felt. The streets were swept clean, their pavements set with smooth blocks of lava, their names absorbed in fresh thoroughfares which, ploughing into gardens and vineyards, and sometimes levelled by the explosion of much gunpowder, ran across the city, or ringed it about, and gave it in more than one direction the air of a Parisian boulevard. Tramcars, electric light, advertisements, and the speculative builder seemed to be everywhere. The old dreamy ways were thronged with a population of half a million. The Tiber was tamed with stone embankments, as ugly as they were needful; and ancient houses, the delight of the antiquary, were torn down to give them a sure footing. Malaria, long known, and almost proud of its name, as the Roman fever, vanished before the science of sanitation. The Ghetto, which was always healthy in spite of its teeming crowds, malodorous rags, and honeycomb of houses packed together, was abolished at a blow. Its area was laid open, and the narrow stage on which Israel for eighteen hundred years had played its part in Rome was put up to auction, but still awaits the highest bidder. When the Jew packed up and marched out of prison, the Pope shut himself up inside the Vatican, from which he has never since emerged. The leavings of ages were swept away, to the dismay of dilettante and pilgrim, while the heart of the politician rejoiced, and the financier drew out his prospectus of a New Rome.

The old, however, was still there. To an incredible extent,

the city over which Pius IX looked out from his windows had been built up of materials conveyed from palaces, temples, market-places, theatres, baths, and a thousand other monuments. But, while Mediæval Rome, quitting the Palatine and Cælian, had slipped into the Campus Martius, it had left the Forum, the Circus Maximus, the Septizonium of Severus, and the Colosseum a world of ruins in one vast solitude, the dust of which attained in some places the height of thirty feet. This strange spectral kingdom of the inane hovered like a ghost on the confines of the later city; and to it the year 1870 came as an era of

resurrection.

Something had been attempted in the way of recovery when Napoleon called his son King of Rome. But now much more was possible. The Rostra of Julius Cæsar, and the fragments of that altar where his body was burnt and Mark Antony harangued the people; certain portions of the Temple of Vesta, in which was kept the eternal fire; the House or Convent of the Vestals, with their statues, and with inscriptions still legible upon them; the Regia, or Chapter House, of the Pontifex Maximus, close to the Via Sacra; much, likewise, that was hidden within the depths of the Palatine, including vestiges of the Roma Quadrata which has been ascribed to Romulus; and now, it would appear, the lapis niger, memorial tomb of the King who had gone up to the gods, and who was worshipped as Quirinus these are by no means all the spoils which the Forum and the adjacent Hills have yielded. The Mound, or Agger, of Tullius has been made accessible; an Etruscan cemetery opened on the Esquiline; and countless early tombs and mural paintings laid bare. Nor has any recent discovery more excited or charmed archæologists than the revelation, suspected by Fergusson, but proved beyond a doubt in 1892 by M. Chedanne, that the existing Pantheon, with its wonderful dome, dates from Hadrian and not from Agrippa. It is certainly a work of that Renaissance which during three decades of our second century filled the capital with noble specimens of Greek or Eastern architecture.*

Before these changes took place, an eminent historian, Gregorovius, had begun his chronicle of the City of Rome as it was during the Middle Ages. Its classic remains have occupied the pens of a crowd of students, among whom Signor Lanciani holds a conspicuous rank. The accomplished Cambridge scholar, Mr. (afterwards Professor) J. H. Middleton, has enabled us, in a work of singular clearness and exhaustive knowledge, to trace

* Dennie, 153, 278.

the Roman buildings from their foundation. Mr. Dennie's picturesque_volume is intended for the average American pilgrim to Europe. Finally, Mr. Crawford has put together a brilliant mosaic, on a plan neither historical nor antiquarian, which does, we think, add a touch of life and romance to more technical treatment. His subject is Rome itself, considered as the Genius Loci; and it shall be ours.

Rome, in the phrase of Montesquieu, is the 'Spirit of Laws.' Massive and stately, majestic but artificial-these terms describe her monuments, literature, and government. Mr. Crawford dwells on the characteristic which he terms 'gigantism'-or megalomania turned to stone-from which the Roman builders have never freed themselves. It is the mood in which were conceived and executed designs quite superhuman, such as Nero's Golden House, the Flavian Amphitheatre, the Mole of Hadrian, and his Villa at Tivoli, the Circus Maximus, the Septizonium, the Baths of Titus, Caracalla, Diocletian, and Constantine, the Tor de' Conti, St. Peter's and the Vatican, and, in our day of small things, that monstrous edifice, the Ministry of Finance. Surely this is an amazing succession. Yet these buildings of the giants, from which cities have been dug out and limekilns fed with precious marble during scores of years, are but samples, which the antiquary sees in a space formerly crowded with erections equal or greater, though now no more. If we would inflict on our historical vision the whole of what Rome has been, we must travel with Professor Middleton round its deserted The imagination, robust as it may deem itself at starting, will faint before it has come to the end. It cannot hold out against a spectacle so bewildering; it will be wearied with a monotonous infinitude. For the first and last word is vastness. The name of the city, which some have thought to mean 'strength,' is echoed over and over again in its palaces, theatres, market-places, porticoes, thermæ, aqueducts, walls, roads, arches, temples, shrines, prisons, fortresses-nay, in its private dwellinghouses, which only cannon would reduce were they manned for defence. There have been nine Romes,' said Ampère. We are looking on the tenth, and 'gigantism' prevails in it as in its predecessors. Be the sovereign who he may, to build up and pull down is the burden laid upon him. In presence of ruins so enormous, any monument less than colossal must appear insignificant and mean.

area.

Professor Middleton lets us into the secret of these nine Romes and their piling up skyward. The materials lay ready at hand, furnished by Nature in her geological processes-the alluvial, marine, and volcanic deposits that have hardened into