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with a French rifle, a pistol, and a sword. He continued, notwithstanding these measures of precaution, to keep the strictest peace, trading and doing good business, making himself known, and at the same time becoming popular with Adoo Shukkoo's people. He had been there three months, when one of his men was killed and his arms stolen. He took no vengeance, but, carrying the corpse in to the king, he said: See what has happened. Now, if you are a great king you will do justice. I ask only to have his arms which have been stolen given back, and I leave the punishment of the offender to you.' The king gave him ground to bury his dead, caused his arms to be returned to him, and punished the murderer. Four months later, the same thing happened again, and he did as before, peacefully asking and obtaining justice.

Seven months had passed, and it was harvest-time, when the king said: "Now go; I don't want you any more in my country." Zebehr's stores had by this time become very valuable. He replied that he was not strong enough to travel with his present escort, and he asked leave to remain till he could send for some of his friends. The king refused. Then Zebehr sent five emissaries to ask if the king would sell him a provision of corn for the journey. The king killed his emissaries, and resolved to attack his camp and take his stores. This action on Adoo Shukkoo's part was not quite so sudden as it sounds in a shortened narrative. He had never been favorable to the Egyptian traders, and Zebehr had for some time past expected an attack. He had friends among Adoo Shukkoo's people, who gave him warning. The native forces were led by the king in person, and were in numbers out of all proportion to Zebehr's. Zebehr's camp was, however, strongly fortified; his 200 men were well armed and well trained. His orders to them were not to waste their ammunition with random firing, but to aim carefully, and to pick out the chiefs. For three successive days the natives attacked; they were repulsed, but not without loss on both sides. Zebehr himself was wounded, and Adoo Shukkoo lost twelve of his chiefs. On the third day Adoo Shukkoo was killed,

and on the fourth day, the natives being by this time disorganized and leaderless, Zebehr and his men made a sortie, and attacked in their turn. The result was a great victory, and the town of Mandugba submitted to him; Adoo Shukkoo's son, Shaida, flying with a following of some thousands of natives to a mountain called Saroga or Saranga.

As soon as Mandugba was known to be in the hands of Zebehr, the neighboring tribes offered their submission, begging him to take the place of Adoo Shukkoo, but to trade with them and not to fight. The first to come in was Oro, who offered to be his ally against the others. Then came Indagu, then Golo, Manga, Engazazo, Kuti, Fara, Shairo, Farora, and others who had owed allegiance to Adoo Shukkoo. Suddenly, from a trader Zebehr had become a king. After twenty days he said to the tribes : It is now harvest-time; let us sign a peace, and go and gather your corn; otherwise when the winter comes there will be famine." The tribes were well pleased, and peace was made among them, and the greater number went to their homes. But Shaida, the king's son, remained in the mountains and threatened to come down and fight. Zebehr said to the people : "You say that I am wise and just, and that you wish me to reign over you. If so, then who will fight on my side against Shaida, the son of Shukkoo ?'' Five thousand came out to fight on his side, and he said: Now let every man whose heart fails him go to his home, and no harm shall happen to him, but he shall gather his corn in peace. Some few went, and thus he had none but braves in his army. He led them to the mountain where Shaida was, and attacked. He was twice repulsed with heavy loss, and he saw that Shaida's position was too strong to be taken by assault; so he invested the mountain for eighteen days. On the nineteenth day, at sunrise, a man looking from the door of his tent saw some one coming, and said, "It is Shaida ;" and Shaida came in and made submission. He acknowledged all his father's faults, and sixteen chiefs who were with him also put their lives in Zebehr's hands. Zebehr accepted their submission, but he had no wish to reign or to kill. He took

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Shaida back to Mandugba, where he reseated him, with certain conditions, upon his father's throne. He gave robes to the sixteen chiefs, and allowed them to return to their homes, and issued the strictest orders that their women and children were not to be injured. This clemency was an extraordinary surprise to people who had expected every kind of severity, and the fame of it spread throughout the country. Fifteen days after the chiefs had returned to their homes all the states of

Adoo Shukkoo's country offered their submission to Zebehr, and agreed to elect him as their king. Shaida continued to enjoy his father's nominal rank, but he appears to have fallen into dependence upon Zebehr, and soon drops out of history as a nonentity. Zebehr accepted the title of Sultan from the lesser kings, and began to live in imperial state at Mandugba.-Contemporary Review.

(To be continued.)

THERE is a certain interesting point of critical analysis which may be stated thus what is the work of invention, and what the work of imagination, in the arts of poetry and romance ? And in what writers does the one faculty predominate over the other; and with what result?

It re

The first part of the question is not very obscure. Whether in poem or novel, invention, broadly speaking, makes the plot. It makes the outline of the story it thinks out the course of the events it sets the scenes. solves, in short, on what shall happen. It decrees that Achilles shall drag Hector round the walls of Troy, that Don Quixote shall tilt against the windmill, that Ferdinand shall play at chess with Miranda in the cave, that Ravenswood shall be swallowed up in the quicksand. Invention determines that such events shall happen; but in the case of the finest work it attempts to go no further. It has proposed the scene: the power which sets the scene like life before the inward eye, the graphic touch which makes it unforgetable, belong, of right, to the imagination alone.

If invention sets itself to attempt what only imagination can perform, it will produce a piece of stage-property, or a puppet, dead and cold. And the reason for this is obvious. For invention, at the best, can only think out, with painful intellectual workings, what details seem most likely to suit the circumstances. But imagination is the faculty which ' bodies forth the forms of things." It sees the scene before it,

with all its details visibly presented, and has nothing more to do than to set down such of these as strike it most-which are precisely those which invention never would have thought of, though it had vexed its brain till doomsday.

As we turn over the leaves of the great poets, examples crowd upon us. We may take one out of "The Inferno"one out of hundreds. It is that of the sinner pulled writhing out of the boiling pitch by the hook of Graffiacane, naked, black, and glistening. "He looked to me, says Dante, briefly, "like an otter.'

We open Milton. There are the hosts of the fallen angels, a thousand demigods on golden seats, rising together in applause as Satan ends his speech; and forthwith there comes the revealing touch of the imagination :

"Their rising all at once was as the sound
Of thunder heard remote."
We turn to Marlowe :

"Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Shall bathe him in a spring ;"

-a piece of imagery which invention. could never have devised, most delicately painted, and as true as it is beautiful. In truth the "realms of gold" are full of such examples. But we have another reason for thus beginning with the poets. There is no difficulty here in identifying the work of the imagination for what it is. But when we turn from these to works which seek to paint the scenes of daily life, a certain difficulty appears. We can no longer always

be sure that we have caught the imagination working. In the instances above given the imageries described were such as the eye of the body never saw, but only the eye of the mind; so that the result must be the work of imagination only, and not of actually observed and recollected fact. We know that it was in the mind's eye only that Dante ever saw a sinner pulled out of a dyke of pitch by the prong of a winged demon; that Marlowe saw Diana's golden hair float over its own golden shadow; or that Milton beheld the hosts of applauding angels rise up together from their golden thrones. But we do not know that Dickens had not actually seen, and recollected, Mrs. Gamp rubbing her nose backward and forward along the warm bar of the fender, or Mr. Montague Tigg diving for his shirt-collar and bringing up a string.

The difficulty, however, is only on the surface. We cannot, it is true, be sure that these particular incidents were not observed; but it is enough for us to know that they were not invented. They are either the life-like work of the imagination, or they are life itself. Nor is there any reason why, in the nature of things, they should not have been the work of the imagination only; for though, if they were so, they are wonderful examples, yet they are not at all more wonderful than those from Dante and Marlowe above cited. The sinner dangling on the prong of Graffiacane is just as vivid a picture as Mr. Tigg bringing up his string.

The fact is, however, that though any single graphic touch may be the result of observation, neither Dickens, nor any other writer of imagination, ever takes a whole character direct from life. And this is one sure mark of the imaginative mind it may copy life in places; but it can do without copying when it will, and yet be graphic and alive.

We may observe, in passing, one result of this which is not immediately connected with our purpose. The writer of imagination, not being bound within the limits of his own circle of acquaintance, but being free to wander whithersoever he will, seems to have lived in a world in which the people are all worth describing. What this means we shall perhaps be better able to realize if we

turn to the work of novelists who confessedly despise imagination, and who set themselves to copy ordinary life without it. Mr. Howells is the type of these. We open one of his books, and immediately find ourselves in the presence of people who are, it is true, exactly like life, but trivial and insipid to a dire degree: people who have as little in common with Becky Sharp, or Dalgetty, or Paul Emanuel, as tepid water with champagne : poor creatures, fit for nothing but to be read about languidly, and then swept into some dust-hole of the mind, and forgotten. And, observe, this must be so. For a novelist who can do nothing but describe from life, cannot, even if he has been exceptionally fortunate, have known very many people worth describing. And it is not enough that a character shall be lifelike it must possess some spark of interest also, or be doomed "to lie in cold obstruction and to rot."

How, then, does imagination act, not in the vivid presentment of a scene, but in the drawing of character? We shall find, on reflection, that it acts by identifying itself so intensely with the persons it depicts, that it knows instinctively exactly what, under the given conditions, each must say and do; which, as before, are just those things which invention could not have discovered-being such as come by intuition, not by thought.

On

Perhaps we cannot do better, by way of illustration, than take Dante's description of the Centaur Chiron, whom he met on the brink of the river of blood, galloping at the head of his troop, and shooting his arrows at the tyrants and assassins, whenever they ventured to emerge from the red waves. catching sight of Dante and Virgil coming across the coast from the ruined cliffs, what are the first words that Chiron utters? Let us try to realize, for a moment, what words he was likely to utter. What were the circumstances of the scene?

The troop of Centaurs, perceiving the two figures approaching down the shore, and supposing them to be two sinners condemned to be plunged into the river of blood, stand still, while one of their number hails them in a loud voice, and demands to know in what depth of the

river Minos has condemned them to stand. Chiron is silent. His eyes, perhaps sharper than those of his comrades, have been caught by a circumstance which the others have not observed, but which seems to him very surprising. One of the approaching figures, as he steps on the loose pebbles of the shore, moves them with his feet: the other does not. Now the spirits of the Inferno have no weight, and their feet move nothing on which they tread. One of the figures is therefore a spirit-but the other, what is he? Chiron has never seen such a phenomenon since he was appointed to watch over the sinners in the river of blood. His astonishment is so great that he says nothing whatever to the strangers as they come up, but turns to his companions : Do you see that the feet of the one behind move the stones he treads on? No spirit's ever did so !"

The surprise of the old Centaur was, observe, not only natural in the circumstances, but inevitable. He must have felt just so. But neither his surprise, nor the cause of it, could have been discerned by any mental process which can be analyzed. It was discerned by instinct, by intuition in other words, by imagination alone.

Just in the same manner do all the great imaginative writers produce their characters. Never, in the whole course of her story, does Beatrix Esmond, for example, say, or think, or do, anything but what, her character and her surroundings being what they are, she must have said, or thought, or done. Beatrix and her compeers in the world of fiction have a common origin with Dante's Chiron.

On the other hand, a character which has neither been imagined nor observed, but invented, has features of its own. Its sayings and doings seem to have no touch of the inevitable. It might say or do anything, and the reader would experience no surprise; for having no character, properly speaking, it cannot do anything out of character. This kind of puppet is most conspicuously present, as might have been expected, in the works of the sensational novelists, who depend entirely on invention. As, however, we prefer to examine the operations of invention at its best, we will not

dwell on these. We will take the case of Hawthorne.

Nothing in all literature is, to certain minds, more curiously irritating than Hawthorne's characters. They are the productions of invention only; but they come just so near to being living creatures that their constant lapses into unreality, both of speech and action, only trouble and perplex the mind the more. If we take our eyes from the characters themselves, and fix them, however carelessly, on the process by which they were constructed, we see, at once, invention at its work. They have been pieced together, as the monster of Frankenstein was pieced together, with toil and anxious thought; and the marks of the process are everywhere visible upon them. In stories of the supernatural this is less felt; but when, as in "The Blithedale Romance," and "The Scarlet Letter," men and women are displayed, we confess that to us the result has something in it singularly repelling. Beatrice Rappaccini among her poisonous flowers, beautiful and deadly as themselves, is to us much more of a real being than Priscilla, or Miles Coverdale, or the Rev. Arthur Dimsdale, or (above all) little Pearl. The opinion will not be popular with Hawthorne's admirers; but we consider him, on the whole, the best example existing of what invention can do, and of what, out of its sphere, it cannot do.

If, now, we go forth in fancy into the world of fiction, and look round us, we shall find that some of the greatest writers have done their finest work without invention, but never without imagination. Probably the two finest novels in our language, after Scott's, are "David Copperfield and "Vanity Fair." The two have scarcely anything in common. They must not be compared together. Each has, like wine, the tang of its own soil. But they agree in this, that each that each has been produced almost without invention having had a hand in the design. Neither has any plot worth speaking of. Invention is not present, even in its own domain: much less does it intrude into the creation of the characters. And this case often happens. Minds of extreme imaginative power often seem to love to throw the reins

upon the neck of impulse, and to let the wild-winged steed fly with them where it will.

"

Invention may be driven, but imagination cannot be. Thackeray and Dickens lived to write at a time when imagination had grown weak and invention was compelled to take its place-with a result that gives us "Little Dorrit" and "The Adventures of Philip. The case of Scott is even more striking. Compare The Bride of Lammermoor,' the most artistic novel in the world, which has invention and imagination both, with "Castle Dangerous," which, though it was written at a period when Scott was only half alive, has invention still. It is the magic of imagination that is wanting.

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If still with the object of comparing the two faculties in value--we turn to Shakespeare, as the sovereign arbiter whose example must decide all issues, we find that he appears to treat invention with some disdain. He takes his plots ready-made, and seems to care next to nothing for situations" in comparison with men. The imagination which produced the character of Hamlet is so great as to be perhaps almost too deep for art. It puzzles us, as Nature does. We do not understand the mind of Hamlet: he does not understand it himself; yet no character was ever drawn more human and alive. And yet the very crisis of his fate is brought about by a shift on which a modern playwright would have disdained to hang the fate of one of his rag-dollsthe interchange of foils in fencing. That Shakespeare could have devised a better scheme, if he had cared to do it, we may take for granted. We are therefore forced to the conclusion that he did not care.

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Are we, then, to conclude, from these considerations, that invention is to be despised? Far from it. In its own domain it is a power. We owe "The Arabian Nights" almost to it alone. Gulliver,' "Robinson Crusoe," "The Pilgrim's Progress," could not have been produced without its active aid; nor, indeed, could some far mightier works, "Paradise Lost," or "The Inferno." But when it comes to making men and women, Centaurs and archangels, breathe and live, invention either stands aside in modesty, or toils and fails.

Solomon (so runs the apologue) was one day musing in his garden, at the fifth hour of the day, when there appeared to him two Spirits, who bowed down before him, and besought him to judge, by his wisdom, which of them was the most powerful. Solomon consented, and commanded the first Spirit to display his might. The Spirit took a piece of rock, and smote with it upon a larger block: again, and yet again, the blows fell; and slowly, as the Spirit toiled, the block assumed the figure of a man. And the man sat motionless and moved not; because he was of rock. Then Solomon signed with his finger to the other Spirit. And he stepped toward the man of rock, and breathed upon his eyes, and upon his feet, and upon his heart. And the man rose up as if from sleep, and moved, and bowed down at the feet of Solomon; for he had become a living thing. Then the first Spirit drooped and trembled; but the eyes of the other shone like light, and he laughed so gloriously with triumph, that at the sound of his laughter Solomon awoke; and behold, it was a dream.-Macmillan's Magazine.