ear is the
last noted upon his monuments. As a builder he was unenterprizing. One
temple at Amada, one hall at Thebes, and his tomb at Abd-el-Qurnah, form
almost the whole of his known constructions. None of them is remarkable.
Egypt under his sway had a brief rest before she braced herself to fresh
efforts, military and architectural.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Layard, "Nineveh and Babylon," pp. 280-282.

[18] Brugsch, "History of Egypt," vol. 1. pp. 367, 368.

[19] Brugsch, "History of Egypt" (first ed., 1879), vol. 1. pp. 371,
372.

[20] Wilkinson in Rawlinson's "Herodotus," vol. ii. p. 302.

XIII.

AMENHOTEP III. AND HIS GREAT WORKS--THE VOCAL MEMNON.

The fame of Amen-hotep the Third, the grandson of the great Thothmes,
rests especially upon his Twin Colossi, the grandest, if not actually
the largest, that the world has ever beheld. Imagine sitting figures,
formed of a single solid block of sandstone, which have sat on for above
three thousand years, mouldering gradually away under the influence of
time and weather changes, yet which are still more than sixty feet high,
and must originally, when they wore the tall crown of an Egyptian king,
have reached very nearly the height of seventy feet! We think a statue
vast, colossal, of magnificent dimensions, if it be as much as ten or
twenty feet high--as Chantrey's statue of Pitt, or Phidias's
chryselephantine statue of Jupiter. What, then, must these be, which are
of a size so vastly greater? Let us hear how they impress an eye-witness
of world-wide experience. "There they sit," says Harriet Martineau,
"together, yet apart, in the midst of the plain, serene and vigilant,
still keeping their untired watch over the lapse of ages and the eclipse
of Europe. I can never believe that anything else so majestic as this
pair has been conceived of by the imagination of art. Nothing
certainly, even in nature, ever affected me so unspeakably; no
thunderstorms in my childhood, nor any aspect of Niagara, or the great
lakes of America, or the Alps, or the Desert, in my later years.... The
pair, sitting alone amid the expanse of verdure, with islands of ruins
behind them, grew more striking to us every day. To-day, for the first
time, we looked up to them from their base. The impression of sublime
tranquillity which they convey when seen from distant points, is
confirmed by a nearer approach. There they sit, keeping watch--hands on
knees, gazing straight forward; seeming,