na, if I should miss the vessel. I fastened round me a girdle con taining what specie I possessed, I arined myself at all points, and took into my service a Milanese, named Joseph, a dealer in tin at Smyrna. This man spoke a little modern Greek, and he agreed for a stipulated sum, to act as my interpreter. I took leave of the captain, and went with Joseph into the boat. The wind was violent and contrary. It took five hours to reach the harbour, from which we were not more than half a league distant, and were twice near upsetting. An old Turk, with a gray beard, animated eyes, deep sunk beneath bushy brows, and long and extremely white teeth, guided the helm, sometimes in silence, at others shouting wildly. He was no bad representation of Time carrying a traveller in his bark to the desert shores of Greece. The vice-consul was waiting for me on the beach. We went to our lodgings in the Greek town. By the way I admired some Turkish tombs, over-arched with spreading cypresses, and the waves breaking at their base. Among these tombs I perceived female figures covered with white veils, and looking like ghosts: this was the only circumstance that reminded me at all of the country of the Muses. The cemetry of the Christians adjoins that of the Mussulmans; it is in a ruincus state, without sepulchral stones, and without trees: water-mellons growing here and there among these forsaken tombs, resemble, both in their form and the paleness of their colour, human skulls, which the survivors have not taken the trouble to bury. Nothing can be more dreary than these two cemeteries, where you observe the distinctions of tyrant and slave, even in the equality and independence of death.

The abbé Barthelemy considered Methone as so uninteresting in antiquity, that he has made mention of nothing but its spring of bituminous water. Inglorious, amid so many cities founded by the gods or celebrated by the poets, Methone occurs not in the songs of Pindar, which, with the works of Homer, constitute the brilliant archieves of Greece. Demosthenes recapitulating the history of Mcasenia in his oration in behalf of the Megalipolitans, makes no mention of Methone. Polibius, a native of Megalopolis, who gives excellent advice to the Messenians, maintains the same silence. Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius, name not one hero, not one philosopher of that place. Athenæus,

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Aulus Gellius, and Macrobius record nothing of Methone. Finally, Pliny, Ptolemy, Pomponius Mella, and the anonymous writer of Ravenna, merely mention its name in enumerating the towns of Messenia; but Strabo and Pausanias will have it that Methone is the Pedasus of Homer. According to Pausanias, it derives the name of Methone or Mothone from a daughter of Eneus, a companion of Diomed, or from a rock which obstructs the entrance of the port. Methone frequently occurs in ancient history, but never as the scene of any important event. Thucydides speaks of some bodies of Hoplites from Methone, in the Peloponnesian war. From a fragment by Diodorus Siculus we find that Brasidas defended this place against the Athenians. The same writer terms it a town of Laconia, because Messenia was a conquest of Lacedæmon, which sent to Methone, a colony of Nauplians, who were not expelled from their new country when Epaminondas recalled the Messenians. Methone shared the fate of Creece, when the latter passed under the Roman yoke. Trajan granted privileges to Methone. The Peloponnese having become an appendage to the eastern empire, Methone underwent the same revolutions as the rest of the Morea. Laid waste by Alaric, and perhaps still more cruelly ravaged by Stilico, it was dismembered from the Greek empire in 1124, by the Venetians. Restored to its former masters in the following year, it again fell under the dominion of Venice in 1204. A Genoese corsair dispossessed the Venetians in 1208. The doge Dandolo recovered it from the Genoese. In 1498 it was taken from Venice by Mahomet I, who made himself master of all Greece. Morosini reconquered it in 1686, from the Turks, who again obtained possession of the country in 1715. Three years afterwards, Pellegrin visited this town, of which he has given a description intermingled with the scandalous chronicle of all the French consuls. Such is the obscure history of Methone from Homer to the present day. As to what befel Modon at the time of the expedition of the Russians in the Morea, the reader is referred to the first volume of the Travels of M. de Choiseul, and the history of Poland by Rhullières.

The German vice-consul, who lives in a wretched plastered hut, cordially invited me to a supper, consisting of water-melons, grapes, and black bread: a person must not be nice in regard to

'victuals when he is so near to Sparta. I then retired to the chamber prepared for me, but was unable to close me eyes. I heard the barking of a Laconian dog, and the whistling of the wind of Ellis; how then was it possible for me to go to sleep? At three in the morning of the 11th, the Aga's janissary came to apprise me that it was time to set out for Coron.

We immediately mounted our horses. I shall describe the order of the cavalcade, as it continued the same throughout the whole journey.

At our head appeared the guide, or Greek postillion on horseback, leading a spare horse provided for remounting any of the party in case an accident should happen to his steed. Next came the janissary, with his turban on his head, two pistols and a dagger at his girdle, a sabre by his side, and a whip to flog the horses of the guide. I followed, armed nearly in the same manner as the janissary, with the addition of a fowling piece. Joseph brought up the rear. This Milanese was a short, fair man, with a large belly, a florid complexion, and an affable look; he was dressed in a complete suit of blue velvet; Two large horse pistols stuck under a tight belt, raised up his waistcoat in such a grotesque manner, that the janissary could never look at him without laughing. My baggage consisted of a carpet to sit down upon, a pipe, a coffee-pot, and some shawls to wrap round my head at night. We started at the signal given by our guide, ascending the hills at full trot, and descending over precipices in a gallop. You must make up your mind to it; the military Turks know no other paces, and the least sign of timidity, or even of prudence, would expose you to their contempt. You are, moreover, seated on Mameluke saddles, with wide short stirrups, which keeps your legs constantly bent; which break your toes, and lascerate the flanks of your horse. At the slightest trip, the elevated pommel comes in most painful contact with your belly; and if you are thrown the contrary way, the high ridge of the saddle breaks your back. In time, however, you find the utility of these saddles, in the sureness of foot which they give to the horse, especially in such hazardous excursions.

You proceed from eight to ten leagues with the same horses. About half way they are suffered to take breath, without eating; you then mount again, and continue your journey. At night you

sometimes arrive at a kan, the ruins of a forsaken house, where you sleep among all sorts of insects and reptiles, on a worm-eaten floor. At this kan you can demand nothing, unless you have a post firman; so that you must procure provisions as you can. My janissary went a foraging in the villages, and sometimes brought back fowls, which I insisted on paying for. We had them broiled upon the green branches of the olive, or boiled with rice to make a pilau. Seated on the ground, about this repast, we tore our victuals to pieces with our fingers, and when the meal was finished, we went to the first brook to wash our beards and hands. Such is now-a-days the mode of travelling in the country of Alcibiades and Aspasia.

It was still dark when we left Modon. I fancied myself wandering among the wilds of America; here was the same solitude, the same silence. We passed through woods of olive trees, procceding in a southerly direction. At day break, we found ourselves on the level summits of the most dreary hills that I ever beheld. For two hours we continued our route over these elevated plains, which being ploughed up by the torrents, resembled forsaken fallows, interspersed with the sea-rush and bushes of a species of briar. Large bulbs of the mountain lily, uprooted by the rains, appeared here and there on the surface of the ground. We descried the sea to the cast, through a thinly sown wood of olives. We then descended into a valley, where we saw some fields of barley and cotton. We crossed the bed of a torrent, now dried up; it was full of rose laurels, and agnus-castus; a shrub with a long, pale, narrow leaf, whose purple and somewhat woolly flower, shoots out nearly in the form of a spindle. I mention these two shrubs because they are met with over all Greece, and are almost the only decorations of those solitudes, once so rich and gay, now so naked and dreary. Now I am upon the subject of this dry torrent, I shall observe that in the native country of the Ilissus, the Alpheus, and the Erymanthus, I have seen but three rivers whose urns were not exhausted; these were the Pamisus, the Cephisus, and the Eurotas. I must also beg pardon for the kind of indifference, and almost of impiety with which I shall sometimes write the most celebrated and the most harmonious names. In Greece, a man becomes familiarized, in spite of himself, with Themistocles, Epaminondas, So

phocles, Plato, and Thucydides, and it requires profound devotion not to pass Citæron, Mænalos, or Lycaon, as he would or dinary hills.

On leaving the valley which I have just mentioned, we began to ascend fresh mountains. My guide several times repeated to me names which I had never heard; but, to judge from their position, these mountains must form part of the chain of Mount Temathea. We soon entered a wood of olive-trees, rose-laurels, agnus-castus, and cornell-trees. This wood was overlooked by rugged hills. Having reached the top of these, we beheld the gulf of Messenia, skirted on all sides by mountains, among which, the Ithome, was distinguished by its insulated situation, and the Taygetus by his two pointed peaks. I saluted these famous mountains with all the fine verses that I knew, in their praise.

A little below the summit of Temathea, as we descended towards Coron, we perceived a wretched Greek farm-house, the inhabitants of which fled on our approach. As we proceeded, we discovered below us, the road and harbour of Coron, in which we saw several ships at anchor: the fleet of the captain-pacha lay on the other side of the gulf towards Calamate. On reaching the plain, which lies at the foot of the mountains, and extends to the sea, we left on our right a village, in the middle of which stood a kind of fortified castle; the whole, that is to say, both the village and the castle were in a manner surrounded by an immense Turkish cemetery, covered with cypresses of all ages. My guide, pointing to these trees, called them Parissos. One of the ancient inhabitants of Messenia would have related to me the whole history of the young man of Amycle, only half the name of which is preserved by the Messenian of the present day, but this name, disfigured as it is, pronounced on the spot, within sight of a cypress, and of the summit of Taygetus, afforded me a pleasure which the poet will comprehend. I had one consolation in beholding the tombs of the Turks; they showed me that the barbarian conquerors of Greece had also found their end in this country, which they have ravaged. In other respects, these tombs were a pleasing object. The rose-laurel there grew at the foot of the cypresses, which resembled large, black obelisks; white turtle-doves and blue pigeons fluttered and cooed among their branches; the grass waved about the small funeral columns

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