of its internal condition, for the drainage of the swampy lands in its neighbourhood which rendered its climate unhealthy, and also for removing obstacles to the safe and easy navigation of the great river by which it communicated with the sea. His ambition being still, however, unsated, he meditated fresh conquests, which, if effected, would have made him master of the world from the shores of the Atlantic to the Eastern Ocean. But his end was now drawing near. The climate of Babylon was malarious, and as his spirits were depressed both by his loss of Hêphaistiôn and by superstitious fears, he was less able to withstand its malignant influences. He caught a fever, and having aggravated its virulence by indulging in convivial excesses, was cut off in June 323 B.C. at the age of thirty-three, and after he had reigned for nearly thirteen years. “So passed from the earth,” says Bishop Thirlwall, “one of the greatest of her sons: great above most for what he was in himself, and not, as many who have borne the title, for what was given him to effect. Great, not merely in the vast compass and the persevering ardour of his ambition ... but in the course which his ambition took, in the collateral aims which ennobled and purified it, so that it almost grew into one with the highest of which man is capable, the desire of knowledge and the love of good. In a word, great as one of the benefactors of his kind.... It may be truly asserted that his was the first of the great monarchies founded in Asia that opened a prospect of progressive improvement, and not of continual degradation, to its subjects: it was the first that contained any element of moral and intellectual progress.” This estimate, high as it is, appears to be just and sober, and to hold a due balance between the extravagant eulogiums and the damnatory criticisms of other writers such as Mitford, Williams, and Droysen on the one hand, and Niebuhr, Sainte-Croix, and Grote on the other, who all alike allowed their ethical and political proclivities to bias their judgment. [Illustration: FIG. 4.—ALEXANDER THE GREAT.]