Note 105 — Chapter XV · RAMESES THE GREAT.

Rosellini, for instance, carries hero-worship to its extreme limit when he not only states that Rameses the Great had, by his conquests, filled Egypt with luxuries that contributed alike to the graces of every-day life and the security of the state, but (accepting as sober fact the complimentary language of a triumphal tablet) adds, that “universal peace even secured to him the love of the vanquished” (l’universal pace assicurata dall’ amore dei vinti stessi pel Faraone).—“Mon. Storici,” vol. iii, part ii, p. 294. Bunsen, equally prejudiced in the opposite direction, can see no trait of magnanimity or goodness in one whom he loves to depict as “an unbridled despot, who took advantage of a reign of almost unparalleled length, and of the acquisitions of his father and ancestors, in order to torment his own subjects and strangers to the utmost of his power, and to employ them as instruments of his passion for war and building.”—“Egypt’s Place in Universal History,” Bunsen, vol. iii, book iv, part ii, p. 184.