casionally showing himself, as a builder, somewhat capricious and
whimsical, still, on the whole, to have worked in a pure style and
proved that he was not deficient in good taste.[20]

It has happened, moreover, by a curious train of circumstances, that
Thothmes III. is, of all the Pharaohs, the one whose great works are
most widely diffused, and display Egyptian skill and taste to the
largest populations, and in the most important cities, of the modern
world. Rome, as we have seen, possesses his grandest obelisk, which is
at the same time the greatest of all extant monoliths. The millions who
have flocked to Rome in all ages have learnt the lesson of Egyptian
greatness from the monument erected before the Church of St. John
Lateran. Constantinople holds an obelisk of Thothmes III., which is
placed in the middle of the Atmeidan. London has put on its embankment,
half-way between St. Paul's and the Palace and Abbey of Westminster,
another obelisk of the same monarch, erected originally at Heliopolis,
thence removed to Alexandria by Augustus, and now adorning the banks of
the Thames, nearly in the centre of the most populous city that the
world has ever seen. The companion monument, after having, similarly,
stood at Heliopolis for fifteen centuries, and then at Alexandria for
eighteen, has crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and now teaches the million
residents, and the tens of thousands of visitors, of New York what great
things could be done by the Egyptian engineers and artists of the time
of the eighteenth dynasty.

Thothmes III. has been called "the Alexander of Egyptian history." The
phrase is at once exaggerated and misleading. It is exaggerated as
applied to his military ability; for, though beyond a doubt this monarch
was by far the greatest of Egyptian conquerors, and possessed
considerable military talent, much personal bravery, and an energy that
has seldom been exceeded, yet, on the other hand, his task was trivial
as compared with that of the Macedonian general, and his achievements
insignificant. Instead of plunging with a small force into the midst of
populous countries, and contending with armies ten or twenty times as
numerous as his own, defeating them, and utterly subduing a vast empire,
Thothmes marched at the head of a numerous disciplined army into thinly
peopled regions, governed by petty chiefs jealous one of another,
fought scarcely a single great battle, and succeeded in conquering two
regions of a m