had hardly reached Cairo
before he was seized with fatal illness. He died on the 23d of November,
1856,--just as he was grasping the fruit of years of labor and waiting.

The best part of the volume of memoirs is made up of Seddon's letters
from the East. They exhibit his character in a most agreeable light,
while, apart from any personal interest, they have a charm, as natural,
vivid delineations of Eastern scenery and modes of life. He saw with
a painter's eye, and he described what he saw clearly and vigorously,
showing in his letters the same traits which he displayed in his
pictures. Writing from his camping-ground on the edge of the Desert,
he says,--"The Pyramids and Sphinxes, in ordinary daylight, are merely
ugly, and do not look half as large as they ought to look from their
real size; but in particular effects of light and shade, with a fine
sunset behind them, for example, or when the sky lights up again, a
quarter or half an hour afterwards,--when long beams of rose-colored
light shoot up like a glory from behind the middle one into a sky of
the most lovely violet,--they then look imposing, with their huge black
masses against the flood of brilliant light behind."

Here is the first sight of Jerusalem:--"At length, about five o'clock,
after expecting, for the last half-hour, that every hill-side we climbed
would be the last, we came suddenly in full view of Jerusalem.--Few, I
think, however careless, have looked for the first time on this scene,
without some feelings of solemn awe. We read the accounts of all that
passed within or around these walls with something of the vagueness that
always veils the history of times that have gone by two thousand years
ago; but however soon the feeling may wear off or be cast away, it is
impossible, with the very spot before you where your Saviour lived and
died, not to feel vividly impressed with the actual reality of what we
have read of, and its intimate connection with ourselves.--But soon I
was struck with the very erroneous idea I had had of Jerusalem. From the
west it does not look at all like a city built on a hill; for, rather
below you, at the farther end of a barren plain, you see nothing but the
embattled walls of a feudal town, with one or two large buildings and a
minaret alone visible above them. To the right the ground dips into the
Valley of Hinnom,--but to the left it is level with the city-walls, and
its surface is covered with bare ribs of rock running