those of Athens, and less full of undignified ruin. The citadel, or palamede, is not exactly at the end of the promontory, but commands both it, the bay, the town, and the approaches from the land. It was built originally by Palamedes, the shrewd Greek who detected the feigned madness of Ulysses, when he was sowing the sea-sands with salt to evade the Trojan expedition. But the crafty Ithacan never forgave him, but compassed his death most iniquitously, while the host was before the walls of Troy. It was at Napoli, that Capo d'Istrias was shot, near the door of a church. It is probable that, notwithstanding his zeal for education and the like, he does not deserve all the sympathy which his fate has won for him. It seems not improbable that he would have betrayed the liberties of his country to Russia, and that for gold.

There was once an idea of making Napoli the capital of the modern Greek kingdom; and some writers have complained that Athens was made the capital merely for its ancient celebrity. Napoli, it is said, is better situated for a mercantile port, and Corinth is yet more eligible. However, even looking at the matter in this poor point of view, it would not be hard to raise objections both to Napoli and to Corinth; and time will probably show that Athens has one great political advantage. If the Greek kingdom is to go on and live, weathering the wicked stupidity of its wretched Bavarian monarch, some of its most dangerous struggles will probably arise from

the unkindly feelings between the Roumeliotes and the inhabitants of the Morea. Now, in this case, there would be mutual jealousy if the capital were in the strongholds of either people; but Attica seems to be a kind of neutral ground, and the name of Athens allays petty envies. But, after all, this is a low view of the subject to take. It was wisest, according to the best political wisdom, to make Athens the capital; the glory of her name, the long line of sacred associations, the mighty hold her greatness has upon the imagination of every Greek, and which will increase as education goes forward, are of no slight importance. Greece has little enough whereon to found a national existence; but she must have, as all nations will have, something imaginative, something resting deep down in the mysterious faculties of our nature, to contribute that unity and that soberness which elevate enthusiasm into the love of country, and to give the people that consistency, that political toughness, necessary for battling with difficulties, which every one must now see to be inevitable, if not insuperable. Then again, the Greeks are in many ways the counterparts of the French; and the same disposition which makes, and always has made, Paris to be France, will most assuredly make the Greek capital to be Greece, wherever it be; and by making Athens, which all are compelled by the voice of the world to venerate, and which the yearly influx of travellers will fill with wealth, to be no

longer a city of Attica, but, with all her past, all her glory in war, art, and literature, to be the common property of all Greece, national pride will be enlisted in her behalf; and in her soil alone is it barely possible for a root of unity to strike, where hope of unity seems, to man's eye, desperate. In a word, imagination is worth something, and swells the reckoning some little even in political matters; and this is forgotten by those who condemn so strongly the fixing of the court and cabinet of Greece at Athens.

As we left Napoli, the early morning was bright and clear upon the hills about Mycena and the summits which run thence to the sea. My fancy painted them with beacons on the top ready to be kindled as soon as Agamemnon's returning vessel could be seen from shore: those beacons, not an artifice of impatient affection, but the precaution of discreet crime. For how many long years did the watchmen look down on this very same scene, this waste of green undulations with occasional blue fringes of sea, the long lines of goats, the white flocks of sheep, and the bearded barley on the Argive plain! The luminous touch of Eschylus is upon those heights, giving them an interest and nobility which many a loftier Alp and more romantic mountain lack. We rode eastward, and during the first few miles we had several most beautiful views of Napoli when we looked back. But the weather

soon became intolerably hot, and the road led us into basin after basin of mountain-land, enclosed on all sides by hills, and where the air was glowing as in a furnace. No breeze could intrude there, but there were plenty of glaring rocks, and no herbage but withered wild thyme. We rested for some little while at a small khan, where we luxuriated in the shade of a hospitable willow-tree near a spring, and got some of that liquid turpentine which passes in Greece for wine. The flavor of turpentine in this wine, though nauseous at first, soon becomes agreeable; and even when most obnoxious, may be borne with as a practical comment upon the fir-cone which headed the thyrsus of the classic Bacchanals. In the afternoon we reached the site of Iero, the sacred city of Esculapius. It is in a singular situation, occupying a mountain hollow, open only towards the west. The ground is spotted with lines of trees, principally evergreen, and is somewhat park-like in its appearance. It is full of remains of a most interesting nature, and I have seen no spot in Greece so touching as the amphitheatre of Iero, tufted with bushy weeds and Greek thyme and aromatic flowers, with here and there a stone gently and gracefully displaced by some protruding lentiscus or yellowblossomed cytisus. Here too is no glory, here no crime, no noisy politics, no boastful literature haunting the grassy hollow and exciting the traveller. It is the tranquil ruin, the pleasant desolation of Greek

domestic life. It was a city whose waters allured visitors from all the provinces, and as with us, so with the Greeks, cities dedicated to health were dedicated to pleasure likewise. In truth it is a pleasant city still, sinking patiently under the hand of calm centuries into the bosom of the flowery hollow from whence it rose. The remains scarcely rise above the level of the ground. Yet all around is solitary and soothing. The mountains stand about it, the mute observers of all its noise, its mirth, and its decay; yet no expression is visible upon them. Long centuries have notched their chronicles upon the cliffs, but the vernal renewing comes and masks these scars from mortal eye. They are as gay and green as ever, careless of silent Iero. It was but a dream to them. They saw the earth grow flowery, after the deluge crushed it, while Greece was yet unpeopled. They saw the mountain hollow slowly fill up from the crumbling of their own mighty ridges. A city was built there, and there were songs and dances and sacrificial flutes for awhile, and then they ceased. And now the fragrant presence of the Greek summer fills the hollow, and hangs upon the mountain ledges, as it did before the land was claimed by that bright race of wonder-working

men.

I lay down at full length upon one of the steps of the theatre, unslung from off my neck the bag wherein my journal and writing-implements were