[p.113]heavy tribute, and yet able to show a considerable surplus of revenue, this country in western hands will command India, and by a ship-canal between Pelusium and Suez would open the whole of Eastern Africa.[FN#39]

There is no longer much to fear from the fanaticism of the people, and a little prudence would suffice to command the interests of the Mosque.[FN#40] The chiefs of corporations,[FN#41] in the present state of popular feeling, would offer [p.114]even less difficulty to an invader or a foreign ruler than the Olema.  Briefly, Egypt is the most tempting prize which the East holds out to the ambition of Europe, not excepted even the Golden Horn.

[FN#1] In the capitals of the columns, for instance. [FN#2] This direct derivation is readily detected in the Mosques at Old Cairo. [FN#3] The roof supported by arches resting on pillars, was unknown to classic antiquity, and in the earliest ages of Al-Islam, the cloisters were neither arched nor domed.  A modern writer justly observes, “A compound of arcade and colonnade was suggested to the architects of the Middle Ages by the command that ancient buildings gave them of marble columns.” [FN#4] “The Oriental mind,” says a clever writer on Indian subjects, “has achieved everything save real greatness of aim and execution.”  That the Arab mind always aimed, and still aims, at the physically great is sufficiently evident.  Nothing affords the Meccans greater pride than the vast size of their temple.  Nothing is more humiliating to the people of Al-Madinah than the comparative smallness of their Mosque.  Still, with a few exceptions, Arab greatness is the vulgar great, not the grand. [FN#5] That is to say, imitations of the human form.  All the doctors of Al-Islam, however, differ on this head:  some absolutely forbidding any delineation of what has life, under pain of being cast into hell; others permitting pictures even of the bodies, though not of the faces, of men.  The Arabs are the strictest of Misiconists; yet even they allow plans and pictures of the Holy Shrines.  Other nations are comparatively lax.  The Alhambra abounds in paintings and frescoes.  The Persians never object to depict in books and on walls the battles of Rustam, and the Turks preserve in the Seraglio treasury of Constantinople portraits, by Greeks and other artists, of their Sultans in regular succession. [FN#6] This is at least a purer taste than that of our Gothic architects, who ornamented their cathedrals with statuary so inappropriate as to suggest to the antiquary remains of the worship of the Hellespontine god. [FN#7] At Bruges, Bologna, (St. Stefano), and Nurnberg, there are, if I recollect right, imitations of the Holy Sepulchre, although the “palmer” might not detect the resemblance at first sight.  That in the Church of Jerusalem at Bruges was built by a merchant, who travelled three times to Palestine in order to ensure correctness, and totally failed.  “Arab art,” says a writer in the “Athenaeum,” “sprang