calculating spirit. The imaginative man has the
same necessity for the development of his
creature faculty as the strongly muscular man of
bodily exercise. He must blow off the steam of
his invention, or the boiler will not contain it.
You and Le Sage and Alexandre Dumas are a
category. You are not the Clerks of a Census
Commission, or Masters in Equity. You are
the chartered libertines of fiction. Shake out
your reefs, and go free—free as the winds that
waft you!"

To all these reflections came the last one. "I
must be up and doing, and that speedily! I
will recover Blondel, if I devote my life to the
task. I will regain him, let the cost be what it
may. Mounted upon that creature, I will ride
up to the Rosary; the time shall be evening; a sun
just sunk behind the horizon shall have left in
the upper atmosphere a golden and rosy light,
which shall tip his mane with a softened lustre,
and shed over my own features a rich Titian-
like tint. 'I come,' will I say, 'to vindicate the
fair fame of one who once owned your affection.
It is Potts, the man of impulse, the child of
enthusiasm, who now presents himself before
you. Poor, if you like to call him so, in worldly
craft or skill, poor in its possessions, but rich,
boundlessly rich, in the stores of an ideal wealth.
Blondel and I are the embodiment of this idea.
These fancies you have stigmatised as lies are
but the pilot balloons by which great minds
calculate the currents in that upper air they are
about to soar in.'"

And, last of all, there was a sophistry that
possessed a great charm for my mind, in this
wise: to enable a man humble as myself to
reach that station in which a career of adventure
should open before him, some ground must
be won, some position gained. That I assume
to be something that I am not, is simply to say
that I trade upon credit. If my future
transactions be all honourable and trustworthy—if by
a fiction, only known to my own heart, I acquire
that eminence from which I can distribute
benefits to hundreds—who is to stigmatise me
as a fraudulent trader?

Is it not a well-known fact, that many of
those now acknowledged as the wealthiest of
men, might, at some time or other of their lives,
have been declared insolvent had the real state
of their affairs been known? The world,
however, had given them its confidence, and time
did the rest. Let the same world be but as
generous towards me! The day will come, I
say it confidently and boldly, the day will come
when I can "show my books," and "point to
my balance-sheet." When Archimedes asked
for a base on which to rest his lever, he merely
uttered the great truth, that some one fixed
point is essential to the success of a motive
power.

It is by our use or abuse of opportunity we
are either good or bad men. The physician is
not less conversant with noxious drugs than the
poisoner; the difference lies in the fact that the
one employs his skill to alleviate suffering, the
other, to work out evil and destruction. If I,
therefore, but make some feigned station in life
the groundwork from which I can become the
benefactor of my fellow-men, I shall be good
and blameless. My heart tells me how well and
how fairly I mean by the world: I would succour
the weak, console the afflicted, and lift up the
oppressed; and if to carry out grand and glorious
conceptions of this kind all that be needed is a
certain self-delusion which may extend its
influence to others, "Go in," I say, "Potts; be
all that your fancy suggests—

Dives, honoratis, pulcher, rex denique regum—
Be rich, honoured and fair, a prince or a begum—

but, above all, never distrust your destiny or
doubt your star."

THE UNHOLY LAND.

WHEN people hear the Sublime Porte
mentioned, they are so accustomed to the conventional
term as to be apt to forget that the
high-sounding title means nothing more than
the Sublime Gate, or the Sublime Door. At
the Théâtre-Français, Paris, they are now
performing a comedy, by Alfred de Musset, called A
Door ought to be either Open or Shut.
Transferring the piece to the Constantinopolitan
stage, we should be inclined to alter it to A
Sublime Door ought to be Shut up—unless it
will forthwith better adapt itself to the practices
of Christian Europe. The very next massacre
of Christians which occurs in Syria will
convince the world that the Crimean war in behalf
of the Sultan was a costly mistake, at least as
far as his Highness and the Turks are
concerned.

As to the door of Syria itself, it is clear that
speedily-coming events will decide whether it is
to be open or shut for good and all. Either
European intervention and occupation will
keep it decidedly open and safe for all honest
comers and goers to and fro, or the Grand
Turk will lock it up close, and put the bloody
key in his pocket. Woe to the Christian dogs
who cannot get out, but are obliged to remain,
after he has so shut it. It will be a pleasant
diversion for the Turkish soldiers to look out of
window, or down from house-top, whenever the
Druses feel inclined to amuse themselves with a
battue of Frank or native Christian residents.
This closing of the Oriental gate against
Occidental travellers increases the interest with
which we peruse Trois Ans en Judée, lately
published by Monsieur P. Gérardy Saintine. If we
once begin to diplomatise with the Porte, instead
of taking the law into our own hands, it may be a
long while before either an Englishman or a
Frenchman has the chance of writing another
Three Years in Judæa. The work is, perhaps,
mainly intended to serve as a guide to
Jerusalem itself; there is, however, a sufficiency of
travel and general observation in it, to make a
sample of its contents opportune.

Jaffa, one of the most frequented entrances
to desecrated Palestine, is built in the form
of an amphitheatre, on a rounded sandy hill,