PREFACE.

A friendly reviewer referred to a previous work of the writer of these lines as " the essence of ten thousand newspapers." That phrase would have been even more applicable to the volumes now before the reader.

The story of British intervention in Egypt and the Soudan, while its importance should raise it to the dignity of history, could only be written, so far as the later portion of it was concerned, after assiduous and laborious reference to a multitude of current accounts and a mass of official despatches and non-official but yet authoritative correspondence.

The occurrences of to-day were to be woven into the history of yesterday; and after the introductory pages, which were more truly historical, and were necessary to account for the immediate situation, and to show the occasion of the attitude which Britain sustained towards Egypt, the whole story has necessarily been a chronicle of events so recent that they had not come into any historical form whatever before these volumes were issued.

The writer had to bring forward what may be called a living history of a remarkable national episode, and to preserve at once the dramatic interest and the complete accuracy of the narrative.

The events that he had to portray and the scenes he had to depict were too recent to have found a place in books of reference or the volumes of circulating libraries : he was therefore confronted by an almost appalling mass of what may be called the material of history; bales and skeins of the warp and woof that had to be -woven into a continuous, consecutive, and attractive narrative,