English growth. The year 1754, in which Hume printed the first volume of his History of England, is the date of the burgeoning of English history; it came to its full greatness in 1776, with the publication of the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The sudden efflorescence of this school of historians, with Hume, Gibbon, and Robertson at its head, may be not too fantastically compared with that of the first great generation of novelists, who began to appear twelve years prior to Hume, and who sustained their glory about as long as the historians did. After Gibbon's death there occurred a period of relapse analogous to that which succeeded the death of Smollett.

The condition of England had, since late in the Renaissance, afforded no general opportunities for the cultivation of purely provincial literature until the eighteenth century began. The existence of work in dialects or inspired by provincial feeling became from that time forth too evident to be overlooked. But it is the revival of letters in Scotland which is likely first of all to attract the notice of a student, and it is the more necessary to dwell on this because that revival, although more important than any other of its class, was at first so imitative, and remained so feeble until near the end of the century, that it may easily be lost sight of in the glare of English literature. There went on a curious struggle between pure Scots and classic English-men who, as Ramsay of Ochtertyre puts it, "spoke their mother-tongue without disguise," finding it exceed ingly difficult to suppress their native idiom when they came to emulate the Spectator or the Tatler. The worst of it was that the Scots' tongue was looked upon as rude and contemptible, and for a long time even the preachings and the practice of Allan Ramsay did not contrive to make the dialect fashionable. The revival of popular poetry came at last, and culminated splendidly in Burns. The use of Scotch prose, except by the novelists in dialogue, has never been seriously accepted, and probably never will be. Toward the close of the eighteenth century America began to supply herself with a species of literature, which, however, gave at first but little promise of all she has done within the last hundred years. By far the most eminent of the early American writers was Franklin, whose works, first collected in 1779, only just come within our chronological limits. Franklin's style is notoriously graceful and charming, but he is almost the only American writer before the Independence who can be named with the recognized masters of eighteenth-century

English. It is curious to reflect that in 1780, a date which to the historian of English literature seems late indeed, neither Washington Irving nor Bryant, neither the father of American prose nor the father of American poetry, was yet born.

This so-called classic age of ours has long ceased to be regarded with that complacency which led the most flourishing part of it to adopt the epithet "Augustan." It will scarcely be denied by its greatest admirer, if he be a man of wide reading, that it cannot be ranked with the poorest of the five great ages of literature. Deficient in the highest intellectual beauty, in the qualities which awaken the fullest critical enthusiasm, the eighteenth century will be enjoyed more thoroughly by those who make it their special study than by those who skim the entire surface of literature. It has, although on the grand scale condemned as second-rate, a remarkable fulness and sustained richness which endear it to specialists. If it be compared, for instance, with the real Augustan age in Rome, or with the Spanish period of literary supremacy, it may claim to hold its own against these rivals in spite of their superior rank, because of its more copious interest. If it has neither a Horace nor a Calderon, it has a great extent and variety of writers just below these in merit, and far more numerous than what Rome or Spain can show during those blossoming periods. It is, moreover, fertile at far more points than either of these schools. This sustained and variegated success, at a comparatively low level of effort, strikes one as characteristic of an age more remarkable for persistent vitality than for rapid and brilliant growth. The Elizabethan vivida vis is absent, the Georgian glow has not yet dawned, but there is a suffused prosaic light of intelligence, of cultivated form, over the whole picture, and during the first half of the period, at least, this is bright enough to be very attractive.

Perhaps, in closing, the distinguishing mark of eighteenth-century literature may be indicated as its mastery of prose as a vehicle for general thought. It is customary to note the Restoration as marking the point where English prose took a modern form. This is true, but there was nevertheless much left to reform in the practice of authors. At the close of the reign of Charles II., we find the most accomplished prose-writer of the age still encumbering himself in the toils of such sentences as this:

"That which is not pleasant to me, may be to others who judge better, and to prevent an accusation from my enemies, I am sometimes ready to imagine

that my disgust of low comedy proceeds not so much from my judgment as from my temper, which is the reason why I so seldom write it, and that when I succeed in it, I mean so far as to please the audience, yet I am nothing satisfied with what I have done, but am often vexed to hear the people laugh and clap, as they perpetually do, where I intended them no jest, while they let pass the better things, without taking notice of them."

A hundred years later, such a sentence had become an impossibility. It is not merely that we should search Burke or Robertson in vain, at their weariest moments, for such a flaccid chain of clauses, but that the ordinary newspaper-man, the reporter or inventor of last night's speeches, would no longer endure this clumsy form, this separation of the noun from its verb, and the pronoun from its noun. It was the work of the period which we roughly describe as the eighteenth century to reform and regulate ordinary writing. It found English prose antiquated, amorphous, without a standard of form; it left it a finished thing, the completed body for which subsequent ages could do no more than weave successive robes of ornament and fashion.

EDMUND GOSSE.

EGYPTIAN SOULS AND THEIR WORLDS.

WHEN we study old Egyptian books, we find in them a number of words which seem to apply to the human soul and to the places in which human souls were allowed to dwell after death. Posthumous humanity is said to be here a ka, there a baï or a khou, all of which names sound strange and barbaric enough; its abode is, according to some, even the tomb where the body lies buried, according to others a country far away to the West, the Amentit, the Rostaou, the fields of Iarou, the fields of Offerings, the Augrit, the hidden part of the world which the Sun-god went through during the night. Egypt flourished thousands of years before its religion was superseded by Christianity-no wonder its wise men had more than once to alter the beliefs their ancestors had entertained about death and the future state.

The oldest form they attributed to the soul, at least the oldest we know, was that of a shadow. Now there are shadows of two different kinds, dark shadows such as are projected by the body upon a wall, clear shadows such as we see reflected in water or upon the polished surface of metal or wood. The Egyptians had outlived the idea of the soul being a dark shadow at the time they wrote their Rituals for the dead; the dark shadows (khaïbit) which we meet in their books are no independent beings, but always cling to the material part of the soul in the other world as they cling to the physical body in this. The clear shadows were called ka or doubles, and were sometimes pictured upon the monuments. They were the exact counterpart of the man to whom they belonged, with the same features, the same stature, the same gait, even the same dress. Some of the reliefs in one of the rooms of the temple at Luxor represent the birth of King Amenhotpou III. While the queen-mother is being tended by two goddesses acting as midwives, two goddesses more are bringing away two figures of new-born children, only one of which is supposed to be a visible and tangible reality: the inscription engraved above their heads shows that, while the first is Amenhotpou, the second one is the double, the ka of Amenhotpou. As with kings and queens, so it was with common men and women.

Wherever a child was born, there was born with him a double which followed him through the various stages of life; young while he was young, it came to maturity and declined when he came to maturity and declined. And not only human beings, but gods and animals, stones and trees, natural and artificial objects, everybody and everything had its own double-the doubles of oxen or sheep were the duplicates of the original oxen or sheep, the doubles of linen or beds, of chairs or knives retained the same appearance as the real linen and beds, chairs and knives. The component particles of all these doubles were so minute and subtle in their texture, that they were imperceptible to ordinary people. Only certain classes of priests or seers were enabled by a natural gift or special training to perceive the doubles of the gods and to obtain from them a knowledge of past or future events. The doubles of men or objects remained hidden to sight in the ordinary course of life; still, they sometimes flew out of the body, endowed with color and voice, left it in a kind of sleep, and went away to manifest themselves at a distance after the manner of modern ghosts. After death, they maintained not only the characteristics of the particular man they had been while in the flesh, but were subjected to the common wants of humanity, to hunger and thirst, to heat and cold, to illness and pain, with the aggravation that, whereas the living have ways and means of protecting themselves against all the evils which befall them, the dead are utterly destitute. If left to themselves, they had to roam about the places they had inhabited and feed upon the refuse of houses, with the certainty of dying out after prolonging their miserable existence for a short time. If properly attended to, they had a fair chance, I cannot say to become immortal-immortality was not a primitive notion in Egypt-but to continue living on and on so long that it would seem almost an immortality to people who believed in doubles for their souls.

Given the definition of what survived in man, the practical consequences of it are easily drawn. Since the double was a perfect image of the being to which it had been linked at birth, what more natural than that it should remain near where the corpse lay and participate in its destinies. Having grown with it, it ought to decay with it gradually, so that the natural term of its existence after burial might be measured by the time it takes the human frame to disintegrate completely. Therefore, the best means of stopping the decomposition of the soul was to stop the decomposition of the