ambitious to imitate the ways of the white man, according to the best of his ability." Long betrays jealousy and is guilty of injustice when he says "only vague accounts" were given of Mtésa by Captain Speke. The discoverer of Victoria Nyanza, Ripon Falls, and the lacustrine sources of the Nile, spent over four months of chafing captivity with this capricious chief, and devotes over one third of a volume of five hundred and fifty pages to a minute diary of his stay in Uganda.

Long was there one month; let him tell us how: "Ill and helpless;" "so weak as to be scarcely able to walk; flesh nearly transparent; once muscular arms and legs mere skin and bone." Arrived June 21, and on the 25th "ill and suffering, and, supported by two soldiers, responded to a pressing invitation of M'tsé to go to the (straw) palace." So sick as to be unable to stand, he was invited to sit in the presence of the king, 66 an honor never before accorded to any mortal!" On the 29th, "fever and dysentery merged into delirium;" "till the 6th of July unable to move from my hammock." Is it any wonder that he dipped his pen in the bile of his own liver, and wrote, "The country has nothing, absolutely nothing, of that grand and magnificent spectacle depicted by the pens of some enthusiastic travelers, who would make, to willing readers, a paradise of Africa, which is, and must ever be, a grave-yard to Europeans?"

Long's great object was to get to the lake. Speke and Grant had seen it at a distance, and skirted its edges, but no white man had been permitted to survey it or to float freely on its bosom. Mtesa at last granted his request, and rounded off his permission with the butchery of seven men, "the bloody price paid that the world might know something of this mysterious region!" It is hard to believe this. Livingstone did not credit Speke's reports about the bloody brutality of Mtesa, and Long takes credit to himself for vindicating Speke at the expense of Livingstone.

Like all Asiatic and African despots from the earliest times, Mtesa held public court, daily or periodically, and the subjects of the autocrat were brought before him for judgments, accused of various crimes, as before a police judge holding his court in London or New York city. No troublesome jury intervened; there was seldom any defense attempted or allowed, FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXII.-16

the interval between the accusation and the sentence, and between the sentence and its execution, was brief, often only a moment. Fines and imprisonments were rare; capital punishments for what we deem venial offenses were rife, as under the Jewish or old English law. Long's hallucination, fostered by lying interpreters, was connecting all these executions of public offenders, State criminals, with himself!

There is no doubt that but little value is set upon human life in Africa; no doubt that power of life and death is regarded as one of the prerogatives of royalty by both kings and people. Mtesa told Speke he had "killed a hundred in a single day." Men, women, officers and private subjects, wives, concubines, were ordered to execution for trifling offenses. On one occasion the impatient king "took upon himself the executioner's duty, fired at a sentenced woman, and killed her outright." In Speke's time, when firearms were new to him, he "gave a loaded carbine to a page and told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court," a wanton "affair that created hardly any interest." Long, to show how little progress Stanley had made in civilizing and christianizing this heathen monarch, quotes Linant as saying that after the departure of Stanley the brutal "Mtesa, to show the accuracy of his aim, leveled his gun deliberately at one of his female attendants and blew her brains out!"

As the outcome of a good deal of urging and petitioning, Long was at length allowed to spend a day or two on the lake. "Twelve hundred men were detailed to escort me." Was this a traveler's guess, or did he see the muster-roll of this merry regiment? In vain he tried to induce the racing blacks to row across the lake. "Weak and in an almost dying condition," he could not break away from his escort and solve the lake question alone, and so its solution was delayed for another year and reserved for another hand.

Colonel Long made some interesting observations on his way back to Foueira, and sums up "the following results, submitted [by him] to the Government of Egypt."

1. "M'tsé, King of Ugunda, had been visited, and the proud African monarch made a willing subject, [astounding statement and his country, rich in ivory and populous, created the southern limit of Egypt!" [Annexation with a venge

ance! entering a man's house as a guest, and claiming his premises as your own!]

2. "The Lake Victoria Nyanza had been partially explored; not thoroughly, owing to my helpless and almost dying condition at the time."

Nyanza explored! Much as a hospital patient would explore Cape Cod bay or the Chesapeake by paddling a day in the harbor of Boston or Baltimore !

The sum of this Americano-Egyptian traveler's observations is that "Central Africa is no paradise, but a plague-spot, and that the negro, the product of this pestilential region, is a miserable wretch, often devoid of all tradition or belief in a Deity, which enthusiastic travelers have endeavored to endow him with. This is the naked truth, in contradiction to all those clap-trap peans which are sung of this benighted country."

From these dismal views we turn to the more hopeful Stanley. His title is shadowy-" Through the Dark Continent" --but his pages are sunshine. Few men are more sanguine, cheery, and full of abounding life, than Henry M. Stanley. The exuberance of his spirits communicates itself to his style, which is rather that of the off-hand newspaper reporter than of the thoughtful book-maker for the reading of thoughtful men. Descriptive, overflowing with good feeling, conversational, declamatory, dramatic, and poetic by turns, his is just the style for popular use, while the grand achievements to which he was providentially led would atone for any defect in the telling, and make stupidity itself eloquence. His "tale would cure deafness."

The definite settlement of the Nile sources, the open problem of twenty centuries, and the determination of the course of the Congo, known only at its mouth for the last four hundred years, are the great geographical feats of the century. They place Stanley in the first rank of explorers. A traveler needs two things-power to see, and power to make others see what he has seen; and both these Stanley possesses in a remarkable degree. Favorable circumstances and a rare combination of personal endowments have made of a New York newspaper reporter the foremost African discoverer of the age. A holiday expedition with General Napier to Magdala, the mountain

stronghold of the fierce Theodore in 1868, his trip in search of Livingstone to Ujiji in 1871, his venturous raid with Sir Garnet Wolseley into malarial Coomassie in 1873, were Stanley's apprenticeship in African travel, customs, climate, and adventure.

spent

It is one of the incidents of the times that an enterprise which in former times would have required the patronage of royalty and princely treasures was boldly undertaken by a couple of daily newspapers. Bennett, of the "Herald," twenty thousand dollars in the expedition to find Livingstone. In May, 1873, Livingstone died on the southern shore of Lake Bangweolo,* and a year later his remains were buried in Westminster Abbey. Stanley was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral, and here we have the inception of his last great enterprise. The first few sentences of "Through the Dark Continent" tell the story of the inspiration, how he caught the falling mantle of his revered predecessor and model. Livingstone was Stanley's ideal moral hero. All through his volumes one cannot help noticing how thoroughly the sturdy Scotchman had impressed himself upon the sanguine and enthusiastic young American. The half-divine man of your imagination draws to himself your love and reverence, molds your being, shapes your future, invests your spirit with his spirit, becomes one of whom you think at every new fork in the highway of life, and of whom you ask, as Stanley was ever asking of Livingstone, "What would he think of my course, and which road would he in similar circumstances have chosen?" Stanley writes: "Livingstone was dead, and the effect which this news had upon me was to fire me with a resolution to complete his work. I bought over a hundred and thirty books on Africa, and studied the subject night and day with the zeal of a living interest and the understanding of one who had already been four times on the continent."

Zeal is infectious, and the editor of the "London Daily Telegraph" caught a portion of Stanley's enthusiasm, the result of which was consultation with the "New York Herald," and the origination of an expedition with three specific objects in view: 1. To explore and map Lake Victoria Nyanza, and con

* Long, with his accustomed accuracy in African matters, writes the name of Lake Bemba "Bageolowe."

nect its waters with the Nile, not by hearsay and conjecture, as heretofore, but by positive information. 2. To finish the coast circuit of Lake Tanganyika, and settle the question of outlet. 3. To follow Livingstone's Lualaba, and see whether it eventuated in the Nile, in the sands of the desert, in some central lake, or in the Congo, each of which had been conjectured or foretold by easy-chair, stay-at-home geographers, whom Livingstone sarcastically calls "theoretical discoverers" and Speke "hypothetical humbugs." No expedition, except perhaps Baker's, at the expense of the creditors of the lavish Khedive, was ever more generously fitted out. For his march to Ujiji, in 1871, Stanley started with six tons of African pocket money, wire, cloth, beads, etc., loads for one hundred and sixty porters. In 1874 the total weight of goods, stores, tents, ammunition, boat and fixtures, photographic apparatus, scientific instruments, and articles too numerous to mention, was over eighteen thousand pounds, nine tons, requiring three hundred carriers. In the absence of the trained elephant, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, Africa's own hints at future burden-bearers, human porters, supplemented by a few asses, are the traveler's only dependence, his prime necessity. In the Anglo-American expedition, as it set out from the coast, were six riding asses, five dogs, thirty-six women, wives of porters or soldiers, ten boys, three Europeans, Fred. Barker, Frank and Edward Pococke, (Thames boatmen,) soldiers, and porters-in all three hundred and fifty-six souls. Stanley is his own historian. Making all due allowance for the sanguine pen of a good-natured, goodhearted, imaginative young man, bubbling over with philanthropy and thoroughly saturated with reverence for Livingstone, bound to make the best of every thing and to tell the best side of every story, the reader of Stanley cannot help feeling, in view of what he accomplishes, that he is a born organizer, a brave and skillful leader, Bonapartish in rapid decision, energy and skill, and Wellingtonian in his power and management of detail. With all the resources of modern science and invention at his disposal, he is to act the scientific explorer; to mark the course and rate of travel; the course, depth, and velocity of rivers; the geology, geography, botany, and natural history of the countries traversed: he has to be astronomer, linguist, photographer, cartographer, meteorologist, journalist,