tried it with negroes under the most favorable circumstances, and failed; and no European that we can recollect has ever thoroughly succeeded. That which can be neglected is neglected, not from a wish that it should not be done, but from a detestation of the fatigue of doing it at an inopportune moment, — that is, at any moment when doing it would break up the sense of the pleasant ease of afternoon, which, in the Asiatic ideal, should constitute the whole of life. Of course, with that temper comes its correlatives, indifference about right and wrong — for if you are not indifferent, the afternoon is always being broken — and a callousness as to what happens to anybody, if the restful ease do but remain undisturbed. Charles II., as described by Macaulay, had the temperament to perfection, would, in fact, have been the most perfect specimen of the Oriental, but that having a trace of Scotland in his blood, he was liable to the curse from which the Asiatic is usually free, — the mental low fever for which we have adopted the word ennui.
We dare say we have failed in making this temperament and its tendencies as visible to our readers as it is to ourselves, but it is the peculiarity which makes those Englishmen who best like the East despair most of administrative reform. They know that a certain rigor will produce honesty, that oppression can be checked by giving certain power of resistance, and that Asiatics who wish well can be discovered, but they know also that all this will not produce an effective governing machine without the Western power of taking trouble perpetually. That is what first of all makes them cry out for "European assistance" in every department, and praise Asiatic rulers in proportion to their readiness to take European advice. They know — Sir Henry Layard, for instance, knows — that besides the readiness to take bribes, and the religious arrogance, and the sensuality, the reformers have to contend with the desire for the "afternoon life," which, in the ruler, produces cruelty, because only cruelty can get him his way without endless trouble, and, in his subordinate, neglect. They know that an Oriental regiment will uninspected go to pieces, because the officers want to avoid the harass of details; that a department will get to a dead-lock, because nobody will worry like Thiers; that a province will grow discontented, because nobody will search into harassing, trivial complaints. They know, in fact, that civilization cannot be kept up if life all the while is to be always afternoon; and that an Asiatic is like an average aristocrat, and regards that afternoon as the summum bonum, to which all else may expediently be sacrificed, and those who interfere with it as "unaccountable, uncomfortable works of God." The European is in Asia the man who will insist on his neighbor doing business just after dinner, and being exact when he is half-asleep, and being "prompt" just when he wants to enjoy, — and he rules in Asia and is loved in Asia, accordingly.
SUBLIMITY BY CUBIC MEASURE.
The sublime, according to Professor Bain, has for its point of departure the physically great, as measurable by the simple instrumentality of a three-foot rule. Unhappily for the susceptible nerves of æsthetically-minded tourists, the sense of sublimity in a large section of mankind appears never to have started on an upward journey of development from this primitive germ. The vast majority of the human race seem perfectly willing to gauge the grandeur of natural scenery, and to weigh the conflicting claims of continents or countries, by a direct appeal to numerical calculation. It remains doubtful whether they would regard our tallest and fattest member of Parliament as the greatest of British senators; but it is quite certain that they consider Ben Nevis exactly eight hundred feet grander than Snowdon, and Mont Blanc some three thousand yards more sublime than either. The same class of mind which sedulously thumbs its catalogue at the Academy or the Grosvenor in order that it may learn beforehand which pictures it should admire and which it should condemn, in like manner compares the height of waterfalls in Murray or Bädeker, lest it should commit the grievous blunder of preferring the Staubbach to Gavarnie, or Rhayadr Ddu to the Grey Mare's Tail. Furnished with a complete table of lengths, breadths, and cubical contents, the statistical traveller ransacks Europe from end to end; and having satisfied himself that this quarter of the earth represents after all only a pocket continent, usually ends by becoming a confirmed globe-trotter, with a pardonable pride in circumnavigating our planet, like Jules Verne's hero, in eighty days.
England, however, enjoys a comparative
