it remained for him who painted the Girlhood of Mary Virgin and the Blessed Damosel to say the last deepest word upon the sorrow and shame of her who bears the curse of an imperfect, perhaps rotten, civilisation. Every woman must love and bless the author of that remarkable, subtle, and powerful poem, Jenny. Nowhere is reverence for womanhood and love of chastity more touchingly expressed than in this picture, seen from the standpoint of an amiable worldling, as unconscious of his own degradation as of his hideous. personal responsibility for what he sees. The one poignant element in this deepest of tragedies is the desecration of youth and beauty and womanhood. There is no dark arch or black flowing river, no hunger, poverty, or homelessness; the degradation is enough. Jenny's faults are neither palliated nor excused; whether her fall be due partly to her own, or wholly to another's sin, is unknown. She is wealthy, her carriage wheels splash mud on the virtuous, in the hey-day of youth, beauty, and health, by no means weary of breath; yet her life is one horror, her luxury more piteous than any long-drawn martyrdom of sickness, pain, or want. She is not heroic, she is "lazy, languid, laughing"; her beauty, though moving, is not unusual. The horror is that this degraded Jenny sleeps "Just as another woman sleeps!" Watching that sleep, the thoughts of the careless sinner grow deeper and more solemn till he cries :

What has man done here? How atone
Great God, for this that man has done,

And for the body and soul, which by
Man's pitiless doom, must now comply
With life-long hell, what lullaby

Of sweet forgetful second birth
Remains? All dark.

At last, at the end of all the ages, the blame is laid at the right door. No more babble of youthful follies, youthful pleasures, of being no man's enemy but his own; no longer "the woman tempted me and I did eat," but plain speaking, things rightly named. And what And what a picture of the pitiless vice that laid Jenny low !

Now turn from the Inferno to the Paradiso, from Jenny to her whose "eyes were deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even"; and who sighs for her lover in her beatitude thus:

When round his head the aureole clings,

And he is clothed in white,

I'll take his hand and go with him

To the deep wells of light,

As unto a stream we will step down
And bathe there in God's sight.

The gentleness of this lyric love which, Browning tells us, is “all a wonder and a wild desire," is best shown under repulse. Suckling's "If of herself she will not love, nothing can make her, the devil take her!" is somewhat crude; Tennyson's "If praying will no: hush thee, Like a rose-leaf I will crush thee, Fairy Lilian!" scarcely kind. Nor is the doubt, "Is it well to wish thee happy?" exactly benign. But there are those for whom Browning's Last Ride is a reconciliation to all the sorrow and failure of life :

Since nothing all my love avails,

Since all my life seemed meant for fails,

Since this was written and needs must be-

-My whole heart rises up to bless

Your name in pride and thankfulness!

Take back the hope you gave —I claim

Only a memory of the same.

And this divine poem is but one of many instances of Browning's noble and gentle conception of love. The Lost Mistress touches

the same lofty chord; "Would it were I had been false, not you, I, that am nothing, not you that are all"; like Andrea del Sarto, it reproaches with tenderness and noble self-forgetfulness. How different from the torrent of angry scorn in Locksley Hall, the passion, that "left me dry, left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye!" "Weakness to be wroth with weakness, woman's pleasure, woman's pain." The lover complains that Amy never loved him truly, for "Love is love for evermore." Yet he cannot continue to "love her for the love she bore"; for she is "unworthy," "having known me to decline," &c. He threatens her with an "eye that shall vex her." "Perish in thy self-contempt," he cries. One feels that Amy was not such a fool after all. This "What care I how fair she be " strain finds no echo in the gentle and generous ArnoldI must not say that she was true, Yet let me say that she was fair,

begins Euphrosyne, which ends—

On one she smiled and he was blest ;

She smiles elsewhere-we make a din!
But 'twas not love that heaved her breast,
Fair child! it was the bliss within.

Is this exceeding deference and tender love for women well? It is very well. Well for women, better for men, because reverence and pure love are the most uplifting and vitalising of qualities. And surely these nobler ideals of the lyric love, that is "so human at the red-ripe of the heart," will raise women as meaner ones have degraded them. For there is scarcely a feminine foible or fault not due to that deepest feminine instinct to please the peevish, ungrateful sex that is always girding at women. Our age has seen womanhood freed from much oppression, lifted from the inane of weak sentimentalism and the narrowness of bourgeois limits, to the "ampler ether" of intellect, art, and affairs. Women are acquiring rights: they will remember that these involve not lessened, but increased, responsibilities.

MAXWELL GRAY.

SFAX AND MAHDIA: THE ITALIANS IN TUNIS

ON

N 8th May came the rumour of the murder of an English missionary and his family, under circumstances of peculiar brutality, at Sfax, some forty miles south of what was once the great mediæval seaport of Mahdia; and, following close upon this, the news that the first French man-of-war had made its way into the harbour of Bizerta—a harbour which Frenchmen hope will, in process of time, turn out to be a modern Carthage.

One of the oldest of extant Roman historians-followed in this by one of the later Latin poets-has expressed a doubt as to whether he ought to reckon Northern Africa-west, that is, of Egypt which, in the opinion of the ancient world, undoubtedly belonged to Asia—as a part of Europe, or as an independent continent; and, however irrational such hesitation may appear from a geographical point of view, it is not without its justification from an historical standpoint. The historian, indeed, might venture further yet, and, regarding the history of Northern Africa round the greater and the lesser Syrtis, might raise the question as to whether, in a certain sense, this district belonged to Asia or to Europe. For, in the ancient world as in the mediæval, the history of Northern Africa is inextricably mixed up with that of Phoenicia, of Sicily, and of Greece. When Phoenicia planted her colonies at Carthage she claimed the soil for Asia; when Greece planted her colonies in Cyrene she claimed the land for Europe. The same contest was continued, though it somewhat shifted its ground, when Carthage strove to wrest Sicily from the Greeks, and when Agathocles of Syracuse retaliated by shipping his armies overseas to Carthage. Half a century later, Rome stepped in as the champion of Europe, and did not pause in her career of conquest till she had turned the whole coast from Tripoli to the Atlantic into Roman provinces. In the seventh century after Christ the struggle recommenced. The Mohammedans under Akba reclaimed for the Eastern world what seven hundred years before it had lost to Rome; and

hardly was the Aghlabite Dynasty (c. 800-909 B.C.) established in Northern Africa when its princes once more essayed, with more or less success, the old task of annexing Sicily to Asia. For nearly two centuries the most fertile island of the Mediterranean was subject to the Califs of Bagdad or Cairo. Then, towards the middle of the eleventh century, the Norman conquerors of Southern Italy-Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger-re-enacted the parts of Catulus and Metellus-swept the Semites out of Sicily and reannexed the island to the Latin world. Somewhat later still, Robert Guiscard's nephew, Roger, now King of Sicily, Duke of Apulia, and Prince of Capua, was fired with a higher ambition still. Like Agathocles or Scipio, he flung his armies across the intervening sea into the lands where Carthage once had ruled. One by one the cities of the coast-Tripoli, Mahdia, Sfax, Sibylla, and Bona, fell before him; and, for some few years, it seemed as though all Northern Africa from Tripoli to Bougie, if not further west, was destined to be reannexed to Europe, and become a vassal province owing fealty to one who was himself the direct vassal of Rome. How very near history in the twelfth century after Christ came to repeating the exploits of the third and second centuries before Christ will be evident from the following pages.

The modern history of Northern Africa begins with the Arab conquest of Egypt by Amrou, the victorious general of the first Califs. Amrou wrested Tripoli from the Greeks, and his younger contemporary, Akba, pressing onward towards the remotest West, if we may trust the old Mohammedan legend, hardly drew bridle till he had ridden his horse into the waters of the Atlantic, where they beat against the land outside the Straits of Gibraltar. There, like a second Alexander sighing for other worlds to conquer, he reproached Providence for not having extended the limits of Africa far away towards the sunset itself, so that over those unmeasured spaces he might have had the glory of compelling non-existent heathens to the worship of Allah. Though beaten back from the Atlantic, Akba's ambition had found itself another goal in the creation of a new city, destined to be the capital of his conquests, and one of the four holy cities of the Mohammedan world. Miracle on miracle attested Allah's approval of this pious work; just as, in pagan or in Christian legend, a deity's approval blessed the foundation of the Western and the Eastern Rome. From that time. forward Akba's city of Kairwan ranked, in the eyes of pious Mohammedans, with Mecca and Medina and Jerusalem.