Rome, intolerant, and a little superficial, Xavier, with his feverish desire for unity and his impatience of individuality, is an embodiment of the sentiment of Rome. Pascal is the spiritual brother, not of St. Francis Xavier, but of that greatly loved if unknown man who wrote the "Imitation of Christ.” He is a singular, complex, most | Francis Xavier that will stand as the attractive personality. A great and type. Strenuous, vigilant, eager to original thinker upon the subject of bring the whole world into the fold of religion, he is not an ecclesiastic; by no means learned in theology (as the schoolmen understand it), his writings on religion have given him a place above many of the great theologians; he is distinguished among mathematicians, but keeps his science rigidly within its proper limits; the master of a consummate literary art, he disdains all the tricks of the rhetorician; ardent, and deeply in earnest, he does not forget his breeding, but is at all times a gentleman. This world-weary ascetic, struggling to kill within him that spirit of Hellenism which loves art and science, poesy and all things fair; this lofty thinker, unceasingly narrowing his conception of piety, is yet far above the mere ascetic or sacerdotalist, and is after all too great for us to see him fully. The extreme ecclesiastic, like Bossuet, is always overmuch of a formalist; and when you have once clearly defined his limitations, you know him almost as the instrument is known to the musician. Still more so with the ordinary ascetic; when you know his temperament and his fixed ideas, you can tell everything of which he is capable. But Pascal eludes you at every turn. He is an ascetic, and even goes so far as to wear a girdle fitted with spikes, which he does not hesitate to use when he feels that temptation is near. He has other extravagances of thought and action, No principles of historical criticism can fully explain him. You can in a way build up Bossuet from the known working influences of the epoch; he is in truth, as most great men are, the product of the time-spirit. Much of Pascal, too, belonged to the time, for no man can make an atmosphere or a world for himself; yet there is a great part of him of which his age gives no promise, and offers no explanation. In these last years, incurably ill, and able only to think fitfully upon a subject, he yet sounds the human heart and conscience so deeply that he puts himself in a class apart from the other Christian apologists of his century. Make what deductions you will for his occasional monastic falseness of tone, you still feel that he desires the truth so such as we usually conceive to be ardently, and struggles so terribly to peculiar to the worst type of religious gain it, that he leaves behind him alto- fanatic, with a small brain, a gloomy gether the scholasticism of the age; nature, and great poverty of blood. It and while in spirit he lives with the is not without pain that we can force early Christians, he obtains a foretaste ourselves to dwell upon this side of of the religious doubts and difficulties Pascal, for it is strained and unhealthy. of the future. A loyal son of Rome, to But it is not the whole man; it is very whom Luther and Calvin are objects of far from that. scorn, he has none of the Roman senti- Not even St. Martin of Tours had ment for unity, but more than the more pity for the poor and suffering Lutheran feeling for individuality. than Pascal; he lived as one of them, The communion of the soul with God, and gave them not only half, but nearly and the joy of the spiritual life; man's all that he had. Charity, that supersense of responsibility, and the awful natural, that divine virtue, filled him mysteries of pain, sin, and death through and through. "All bodies tothese are the things that occupy Pascal.gether," he says, "and all minds toIf we seek among the illustrious sons gether, and all their productions, are of the Church of Rome a representative not worth the least movement of of her spirit, it is not Pascal but St. charity; that is of an order infinitely higher." Nor was this mere theory | Copt, Turk, Jew, Nubian, Syrian, with him; he shaped his conduct by it. Negro, Soudanese, Berber, Albanian, His life in these years is inexpressibly Armenian, Indian, you can see them pathetic. Surely no man in mortal all commingled in this ever-varying sickness ever thought more nobly. crowd, with eyes centred upon the For be it remembered that he was ship. Well might it be said in classic above all things a thinker and not a lore that Proteus had his home at this man of action, but one of those think- place, for Protean indeed are the diverers whose words are acts. To be near sities of costume and type which we unto death for years while you are can see around us. It is just the same young, and to know that health will as when Dion the golden-mouthed oranever again be yours, yet to face your tor was here eighteen hundred years lot with unflinching courage, while in ago, and when the same sight saluted soul you remain pure, human, and of and astonished him (Orat. xxxii.: undimmed faith; not to murmur at "Halians, Syrians, Libyans, Cilicians, your destiny, or ask with the faint-Ethiopians, Arabians, Bactrians, Perhearted ones whether it is good to live, |sians, Scythians, and Indians ” he menbut to be brave, humble, and in charity tions). You feel for some days that with all men, while you continue to "seek the truth with groans," until death completes his hold upon your frail body—this is to live worthily, as a hero and saint should live. And thus lived Pascal. From The Nineteenth Century. A WALK IN ALEXANDRIA, you never shall be weary of simply watching these lithe, spare, and graceful men, and that you never shall be able to distinguish between them, or feel at ease with dark faces everywhere about you. It is not, however, the present that we need regard now. It is in the days of its Grecian glory that we like to think of it. Happy Return—and the two most ancient civilizations we know of, Egypt and its pupil Greece, seem to join here in greeting us. It is ancient classic Greece which WHAT a wonderful scene is that pre- comes out to welcome one in this beausented to our view as we draw up along-tiful harbor of Eunostos-the Port of side the quay at Alexandria! The fine broad wharves, built by Englishmen, and identical with those of their own sea-girt land, are crowded with a mass of humanity differing in face and dress The whole tale of how the city archifrom anything experienced before in tect, Dinocrates, came to know his European travel; the eyes wander great employer, and the city's founder, over the great congregation of men — is far more worth thinking about as no white faces seem present, or else you drive or walk through the modern they are lost in the multitude of those town than anything you will see there, of Asia and Africa. What a mixture so let me tell it. Dinocrates was a of races and appearances, as well as of Macedonian, the Lesseps of his time, a characters, meet you upon this Alex- genius of daring design, and it is to be andrian quay! To those who have hoped quite out of accord with the never been out of Europe before, it is popular feeling of his day in his crava sight never to be forgotten; you ing for self-advertisement. He had there meet for the first time that grave, perhaps contracted the corrupt practice impassive face of the Eastern, bearing from Herostratus (or Eratostratus), the himself erect and nobly, with his grace-scoundrel who had destroyed the Temful fall of robe and ample turban; their ple of Diana at Ephesus upon the first bright black eyes seem full of calm in- birthday of Alexander, in order, as he telligence and repose, but you feel your- himself confessed, that future ages self unable to read them as you can might not be ignorant of his name, those of your own race. Arab and such being his passionate lust for notoVOL. LXXXIII. 4272 LIVING AGE. riety that he cared not whether his "I am Dinocrates, the Macedonian fame were good or evil. Dinocrates architect, and bring to your Majesty had been called upon to restore this thoughts and designs worthy of your temple, which, in order that the earth- greatness." When Alexander heard quakes might not ruin, had been placed in a marsh upon foundations of charcoal and goat-skins! It was in this restored building that St. Paul preached, and where that apostle must have seen the great picture of Alexander painted by Apelles, upon its walls, and from which arose the saying that there were two Alexanders the Great, one the invincible, the son of Philip, and the other the inimitable, the work of Apelles (Plut). We have in our national Museum about sixty tons of Dinocrates' stones. that it was he who had restored the Temple of Diana of the Ephesians, he asked him what next he proposed to do. "I have laid out Mount Athos,” responded he, "to be sculptured as one block, and to be hewn into the fashion of the limbs and features of your Majesty. In your left hand I have designed a city of ten thousand inhabitants, and into your right I have conducted all the rivers of the mount, and formed them into a sea, from whence they flow to the ocean. Thus, sire, shall a memorial be left worthy Our architect, after completing his of your greatness." Alexander was work at Ephesus, and moved by the amused at the audacity of the man, and vivid art of the portrait-painter, deter- dismissed him; nevertheless he rememmined to personally interview the great bered him when he wanted to build monarch, and therefore, setting out for Alexandria, and the tradition of its his camp as he returned from his East-planning is quite in keeping with the ern triumphs, he cast about for a theatrical character of the clever fellow. device by which he could gain his audience and likewise flatter his sovereign. Now there was one weakness, or it may have been a noble yearning, in the great conqueror's heart, that, just as his own reputed father had claimed the God-like hero Hercules as sire, so Alexander desired it might be proved that no earthly parent had begotten him (Alexander). Some men did, indeed, say that he was not Philip's son, but of Nectanebo, an Egyptian mage and lover of Olympias, and perhaps it was to solve all doubt that Alexander thought he would remove his parentage beyond human reasoning. However, he had not as yet finally fixed upon Jupiter Ammon, and the crafty sycophant Dinocrates deemed that he would best flatter the great king by a reference to the grandfather. Anointing, therefore, his body with oil, and wreathing his temples with Herculean poplar, with the skin of a Nemean lion over his shoulder, and flourishing a club, he approached the court of the king, and stood prominently forth in his singular garb. "Who are you?" must have said his Majesty, to which the unabashed self-advertiser replied, He cast his Macedonian cloak down as the design, giving it "a circular border full of plaits, and projecting into corners on right and left," as Pliny says, and made the new port the sweep of the neck and the Pharos and Lochias promontories the jewelled clasp. A relic of the tradition may perchance be seen in the name Pharos, which means a loose cloak or mantle, as possibly a recollection of his work at Ephesus in the point Lochias, a title of Diana. Another tradition connected with the city's origin is that Alexander marked its circuit himself, dropping a white powder to indicate its limits; but, this failing, he took the sacks of flour or grain heaped up to feed the workmen, and employed that. To his dismay next day he was told that all his labor had been in vain, for that as soon as he had departed down swooped the blackbirds- no doubt those grey-backed crows with their robes of powdered satin-and ate up all his plan; but those priests of the fowls of the airthe augurs with their ever-pleasant lore, reassured him that it was a most favorable sign, and that it foretold, what came so true, that nations should flock thither for food and subsist upon its wealth. That was many hundred years before Egypt became the granary of Rome, or when it was easy to "find a ship of Alexandria, corn-laden, sailing into Italy" (Acts xxvii. 6, 37; xxviii. 11), as it was in St. Paul's day; but from the earliest its fashionable quarter was named the Bruchium, Puroucheion, supposed to mean a granary. Alexander never lived to see the city completed but most of the celebrated buildings we know so well by name—the Museum, Soma, Library, Gymnasium, etc.. were the work of the architect he had chosen, who, if he had not also died, had projected one of his daringly fresh designs for a temple or memorial of Arsinoë, the wife of Ptolemy Philadelphus, in which a dome was to be arched with loadstones so that the lady's image, made of iron, might hang suspended in the air without support (Plin. II. N. xxxiv. 42). The Museum, the home of the Muses, was in shadow reproduced by our mediæval universities—not a place where collections of relics of the past were stored up, but where students of literature, science, or art, whether as teachers or taught, lived together in an atmosphere of intellectual luxury. In its corridors and porticoes, the porticoists, or peripatetics, sat with their pupils around them, the same as the monks did in the cloisters of our own Winchester, Gloucester, or WestminsOne's thoughts naturally turn to the ter, and as the Arab may be seen to do great Library, which was "the wonder still, in the school mosque of Al-Azhar; of antiquity and the conundrum of in Cairo, to-day. To this venerable modern scholarship," and we first learn university, a still more venerable, that that hitherto we have had no distinction of Heliopolis - the On of the Bible in our casual thought between the great transferred its reputation, and we owe Library of the Museum and that of the to it the preservation of Greek literaSerapeum burnt by the Arab conqueror. ture and its influence upon Western Indeed, even the learned are at variance culture. Surely, gratitude alone should as to how many great libraries there make us anxious to dwell for a while in were here. The illustrious Orientalist thought at the grave of so beneficent a Silvestre de Sacy, who examined the mother! Even up to the seventh cenquestion, arrived at the conclusion of tury of our era, its schools of astronthere having existed four separate ones omy, physics, geology, etc., retained -(1) the library collected by the Ptol- their reputation, and the revival of sciemies; (2) that of the Serapeum; (3) ence amongst us is but the return to one attached to the Sebasteum, and (4) Alexandrian principles, and natural scianother of the School of Alexandria. ence is indissolubly connected with its But it is only the two former that are schools. It is interesting to think just universally known. We were inquiring now, when the world of literature has for the site of the Museum, and were been delighted with the recovery of a astonished and disappointed to be led lost work of Aristotle, and when a ruacross the street from our hotel to mor prevails of the possible discovery where a thick mass of building now of his tomb, that it was the library of stands, and taken to the Bourse, and the great peripatetic philosopher which told that, where the modern thought formed the nucleus of that of this city; was given over solely to the search for and it was a singularly appropriate begold, the ancients sought for wealth of ginning, for had he not been the vala far more precious description to the ued and revered tutor of the city's world and its children; and yet the founder, who was wont to say that his change is as true as it is sadly signifi-natural father had given him existence, but that his second father, Aristotle, | phus says that he did this in gratitude had taught him how to make use of it? for "their services against Egypt " (B. J. ii. 18, 7); moreover, numbers The Arabs, to this day, call him Alexander's vizier; moreover, he is the proto-bibliophilist, the first known collector of a library, according to Strabo, and it is considered that the honor is due to him of having in some way suggested this collection to the Ptolemies. They talk of there having been several hundred thousand volumes in it at the time of its destruction. What a cruel loss it seems to us who treasure a single manuscript of even the fourteenth century so highly! Try if you can and realize that these were veritable volumes, rolls of papyrus or byblus, either the originals of writers whose names and works have thrilled through long centuries eighteen, nineteen, twenty or else beautifully executed copies; not a printed line among them, every letter the outcome of human exertion. The originals of some of Aristotle's works were probably here, so too those of Sophocles, Eschylus, and Euripides; and the tale is told that they were ob- But it was not for the use of the tained on pledge from the archives of Hebrew population that the Septuagint Athens, when a famine was sore in translation was made of their Scripthat land, and when Ptolemy Euergetes, tures; but the desire of the day was to like a second Joseph, would in no way understand all knowledge, and the vengrant it corn unless the messengers erable books of the Jewish people were brought them. Indeed, the Ptolemies the most precious of remaining ancient seem to have been truly Grecs in their literature. Moreover, the revelation to enrichment of the collection, for they Alexander of the prophecies of Daniel borrowed originals and returned but must have been very attractive, and beautiful copies; and furnished an made him and his wise men desire furearly example of custom-house offi- ther information. It may be mentioned ciousness by searching all travellers and in passing that to this day the Arab impounding replicas of any works they shows a santon or tomb which he highly might be possessed of. It was in the reveres as that of El-nabi Daniyal (DanLibrary of the Museum upon this Bourse iel the prophet), although the Persians site that the Septuagint was translated. say they possess it at Susan or Sus (Ibn The Jewish population was a large one Haukal, p. 76)—but the tradition in from the city's foundation; they had connection with Alexander's city, the won the favor of the great Alexander conqueror of Persia, is worth a thought from that day when, marching upon as to which is the real one, if either. Jerusalem to destroy it, he was met by Philadelphus's librarian, Callimachus, Jaddus, the high-priest, who showed introduced a great number of both Jewhim in the Book of Daniel how it was a ish and Egyptian works into his colGrecian prince that the prophet had lection, and among the former were foretold should destroy the kingdom of portions of the Septuagint, and of the Persia. He was ready, therefore, to latter we know nothing whatever. give them anything, and granted to are told by Josephus that each transthem a quarter of his new city. Jose- lator of the Septuagint received over We |