Though thus useful, beneficent, and indeed essential to the existence of Egypt, the Nile can scarcely be said to add much to the variety of the landscape or to the beauty of the scenery.  It is something, no doubt, to have the sight of water in a land where the sun beats down all day long with unremitting force till the earth is like a furnace of iron beneath a sky of molten brass.  But the Nile is never clear.  During the inundation it is deeply stained with the red argillaceous soil brought down from the Abyssinian highlands.  At other seasons it is always more or less tinged with the vegetable matter which it absorbs on its passage from Lake Victoria to Khartoum; and this vegetable matter, combined with Its depth and volume, gives it a dull deep hue, which prevents it from having the attractiveness of purer and more translucent streams.  The Greek name, Neilos, and the Hebrew, Sichor, are thought to embody this attribute of the mighty river, and to mean “dark blue” or “blue-black,” terms sufficiently expressive of the stream’s ordinary colour.  Moreover, the Nile is too wide to be picturesque.  It is seldom less than a mile broad from the point where it enters Egypt, and running generally between flat shores it scarcely reflects anything, unless it be the grey-blue sky overhead, or the sails of a passing pleasure boat.

The size of Egypt, within the limits which have been here assigned to it, is about eleven thousand four hundred square miles, or less than that of any European State, except Belgium, Saxony, and Servia.  Magnitude is, however, but an insignificant element in the greatness of States—­witness Athens, Sparta, Rhodes, Genoa, Florence, Venice.  Egypt is the richest and most productive land in the whole world.  In its most flourishing age we are told that it contained twenty thousand cities.  It deserved to be called, more (probably) than even Belgium, “one great town.”  But its area was undoubtedly small.  Still, as little men have often taken the highest rank among warriors, so little States have filled a most important place in the world’s history.  Palestine was about the size of Wales; the entire Peloponnese was no larger than New Hampshire; Attica had nearly the same area as Cornwall.  Thus the case of Egypt does not stand by itself, but is merely one out of many exceptions to what may perhaps be called the general rule.

If stinted for space, Egypt was happy in her soil and in her situation.  The rich alluvium, continually growing deeper and deeper, and top-dressed each year by nature’s bountiful hand, was of an inexhaustible fertility, and bore readily year after year a threefold harvest—­first a grain crop, and then two crops of grasses or esculent vegetables.  The wheat sown returned a hundredfold to the husbandman, and was gathered at harvest-time in prodigal abundance—­“as the sand of the sea, very much,”—­till men “left numbering” (Gen. xli. 49).  Flax and doora were largely cultivated, and enormous