And I would not be mock'd in a madhouse! and she,

the delicate wife,

With a grief that could only be cured, if cured, by the surgeon's knife,—

XV.

Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of pain

If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain,

And the homeless planet at length will be wheel'd thro' the silence of space,

Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race,

When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its

last brother-worm will have fled

From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth that is dead?

XVI.

Have I crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? O yes,

For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the

popular press,

When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls

are whooping at noon,

And Doubt is the lord of this dunghill and crows to

the sun and the moon,

Till the Sun and the Moon of our science are both of

them turn'd into blood,

And Hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good;

For their knowing and know-nothing books are scatter'd from hand to hand

We have knelt in your know-all chapel too looking over the sand.

XVII.

What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has

Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us

groan!

XVIII.

Hell? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have

been told,

The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser

would yearn for his gold,

And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a

God as you say,

His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish'd away.

XIX.

Ah yet I have had some glimmer, at times, in my gloomiest woe,

Of a God behind all-after all-the great God for aught that I know;

But the God of Love and of Hell together—they cannot be thought,

If there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and bring him to nought!

XX.

Blasphemy! whose is the fault? is it mine? for why

A madman to vex you with wretched words, who is

best in his grave ?

Blasphemy! ay, why not, being damn'd beyond hope of grace?

O would I were yonder with her, and away from your

faith and your face!

Blasphemy! true! I have scared you pale with my scandalous talk,

But the blasphemy to my mind lies all in the way that you walk.

XXI.

Hence! she is gone! can I stay? can I breathe divorced from the Past?

You needs must have good lynx-eyes if I do not escape you at last.

Our orthodox coroner doubtless will find it a felo

de-se,

And the stake and the cross-road, fool, if you will,

does it matter to me?

ALFRED TENNYSON.

THE ADMINISTRATIVE MACHINERY OF

EGYPT.

RECENT events in Egypt have let in considerable light upon the administrative machinery of the Khedivial Government. They have revealed, as regards the army, that there is no such thing as controlling power in the hands of the War Minister, and that the organisation of the army is such as to admit of the Khedive himself being a tenant-at-will of the army, both as regards his palace and his throne. When, last February, the regiments of the Guard violently released their colonels from arrest, and, with the aid of the negro regiment which figured so prominently in the émeute in September, succeeded not only in wringing from the head of the State a promise of oblivion for their indiscipline, but the reinstatement of their colonels and the dismissal of the War Minister, the principle of authority was mortally wounded, and free government became sooner or later impossible. Careful observers, resident in Egypt, wondered that the demonstration of this impossibility was deferred till so late as the 9th of September. The device of referring the grievances of the army to a viceregal commission, whereof the chief of the violentlyrescued colonels was a member, was not calculated to give permanent peace, and no use was made of the time spent by the Commission in its deliberations to seize again the reins of authority. Thus it was evident that sooner or later successful force, with arms in its hands, would at no distant date again upset the Government coach. No stronger protest against reliance on the work of the Army Commission could have been given than was given by Sir Frederick Goldsmid when he refused to sit any longer in a council which allowed the discussion of a proposal that in future officers should be appointed to regiments on the nomination of the colonel, and that colonels should be selected by the regiments. Yet the Commission continued its work and came to certain conclusions. Of these the Administration took no heed until the same violence which had given rise to the Commission forced its conclusions upon the Minister's notice. It is not necessary to state what these conclusions were; enough that one of them included a proposal greatly to augment the force which had already become a nuisance. But the administrative machinery of the War Office was perfectly unable to deal with the question. It left