ISMAIL IN HIS GRANDEUR. 79 hardly have referred to the pageants, which celebrated the opening of the Suez Canal, if they did not illustrate the utter contempt for considerations of economy, which characterized the heyday of Ismail's reign. This much, however, shpuld be remembered in his favour, that, however culpable his extravagance may have been, it was palliated by a sort of perverted grandeur of conception. The other day I happened to pick up an autobiography written by a young gentleman, whose sole claim to note lay in the fact that, in the space of twelve months, he had got rid of the fortune of half a million which became his own on the attainment of his majority. What struck me most in its perusal was not the outlay by which in a year s time the author reduced himself from opulence to penury, as the absolute absence of any consideration in return for the wealth he had wasted. No such charge could be brought against the Khedive Ismail.

He found Egypt solvent and prosperous with a public debt of only four millions, and in less than ten years ) he was the ruler of a ruined and almost bankrupt State, burdened with debts of over a hundred millions, which had all been contracted by himself and spent, in ') the main, for his own aggrandizement. Still, in return / for the ruin he had brought on himself and his : countrj', Ismail had his day of triumph, and left his \ mark on history. Nothing which occurred later canalter the fact that at the period when the ships of the world, going to and fro between East and West, exchanged the Cape route for the Canal across the