Travels in the Morea, and the Travels in Northern the same author, though inferior to the Topography of systematic arrangement and completeness of informatio it, must form the basis of at least all English enquiry topography in general. Dr. Wordsworth's Athens and the work of a most accomplished scholar, supplying portant deficiencies in Col. Leake's earlier edition, and lar view of Greek geography which he has given in press to the Pictorial Greece, occupy blanks which ha otherwise filled. In Germany, we may hope for the the investigations of K. O. Müller, so ably pursued, and fully interrupted-and for their continuation, by We has just returned from a journey to Greece, undertal view to that express object. And from Athens itsel and Dr. Ulrichs, professors in the University of A illustrated Greek topography, the former, by variou some of the disputed points in Athens, and some di the Greek Islands, and the latter, by a valuable work and especially on Delphi. Nor must we omit th papers of Mr. Finlay, on Marathon and Diacria, or Gordon, on the Pass of Thermopyla.

Greek topography, therefore, is occupying, if it has occupied, a large space in classical literature, and it ma be desirable to call attention to a few points, which that it is not labour spent in vain.

This is not the place to show the connexion of with history but that there is a peculiar interest in graphy of Greece, over and above what it has in comm of other countries, might be inferred from the vast p works which have been written upon it. The work of as a survey of one particular country, stands alone literature. Geographers of course there are besides, is the only country which can boast of an extant1 a

1 It is not of course meant that there are no other topographies than that of Greece, but that Greek topography alone awakened sufficient interest to produce works which should survive. For an account of the elaborate topographies of

Athens which have perish teen books of Heliodoru polis alone of the four bo on merely the dedications -see Leake, i. 36 (2nd ed

= Northern Greece, by Dography of Athens, in information, yet, like ish enquiry on Greek thens and Attica, as upplying several imition, and the popugiven in the letterwhich had not been e for the results of sued, and so mourn by Welcker, who undertaken with a mens itself, Dr. Ross ity of Athens, hare by various tracts on some discoveries in able work on Phocis, omit the elaborate acria, or of General

graphy. Even in the middle ages the interest was not entirely laid asleep,—the very extravagance of the misnomers which were affixed to every existing ruin, proves the impossibility which men found of remaining in conscious ignorance about a place once so famous. And from the time of Spon and Wheler to the living writers who have just been enumerated, the catalogue of authors on Greek topography, in the introduction to Dr. Wordsworth's Greece, sufficiently shews how powerful an attraction it has possessed for the mind of civilized Europe.

Various causes, doubtless, have contributed to this result. In ancient times, Greece possessed facilities for a study of its topography beyond those of any other country in the then civilized world. Whilst the remains of Egypt attracted notice indeed, but not from the natives of the soil, and whilst the relics of old Rome were buried, then as now, under the grandeur of the empirewhilst Palestine was the land of a nation who were expelled from it before the age when nations begin to be antiquarian-Greece was in the singular position of a country full of antiquities, yet with a still living people, exactly in that stage of decline when antiquities are invested with the greatest charm.

And in modern times, whilst its great fame would of itself excite inquiry, the impediments which the difficulties of travelling throw in the way of a complete elucidation of the topography in any single work, as well as the wish of every new visitant to discover new objects of interest, in a country imperfectly known in Western Europe, would naturally tend to multiply the works connected with it, and prolong them over a long period of time. But there is something deeper than this, which lends a peculiar charm to the study-there is an interest with which the traveller looks upon the scenery of Greece, over and above the mere pleasure arising from early and solemn associations. This charm is supplied, this interest is awakened, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, by the fact, that no other country of equal fame can display so visible a connexion between the character of the scenery and the character and fortunes of those who inhabited it. Of Greece, most emphatically, is it true, that the

2 Thirlwall's Greece, 11. 362.

men were not made for the country, but that the made for the men. Athens could have been now Athens. The oracle of the Greek race could have fo

propriate home nowhere but at Delphi. The cons this peculiarity has, from the earliest times, been in those who, by study or residence, have become famil features of Greece. The ancient legend, preserved represented Pallas as planting her chosen race in cause a glance at the country showed her that it wa framed for the nurture of virtue and of wisdom. An times it is the characteristic of the histories of Greed others, that, from the scanty sketch which is cont first chapter of Goldsmith, to the vivid and elabo which occupies the same place in Thirlwall, they a a delineation of its geography.

The connexion in question is, of course, indisputa less, in every case. Few, for instance, can have w without being impressed by the seeming anticipation greatness in the peculiarities of its situation. We somet at the prophetic intimations of the duration of its e early legends which describe the twelve vultures of 1 the resistance of Terminus to remove from the ca command of Tarquin; or at the manner in which the of its founder's infancy symbolises the martial spiri like character of his people. Yet these are not m able, nor are they such certain shadows cast before b destinies of the eternal city, as are suggested by ob in the first hour of its birth, it was planted, not on ful and luxurious shores of Campania; nor on the c Etrurian height, where expansion would have been

3 ἅτ ̓ οὖν φιλοπόλεμός τε καὶ φιλόσοφος οὖσα ἡ Θεὸς τὸν προσφερεστάτους αὐτῇ μέλλοντα οἴσειν τόπον ἄνδρας, τοῦτον ἐκλεξαμένη πρῶτον κατῴκισεν. ᾠκεῖτε δὴ οὖν νόμοις τε τοιούτοις χρώμενοι, K.T.A. Plato, Timæus. 6. So Critias, 4. 4 We cannot make this remark without noticing the powerful expression of the idea in the " Prophecy of Capys," in Mr. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.

We are not aware of any man writers where the tinctly brought out; 1 impossible to see the b capitol without recogni tention to express the fi table character of its sup 5 This provision for pansion of Rome is w Topography of Rome,

at that the country was e been nowhere but at uld have found its apThe consciousness of es, been impressed on come familiar with the preserved by Plato3 race in Attica, behat it was by nature om. And in modern of Greece, above all is contained in the and elaborate picture 11, they all open with

- indisputable, more or an have visited Rome nticipation of its future We sometimes wonder n of its empire in the tures of Romulus; or n the capitol at the which the august story tial spirit and 'wolfe not more remarkbefore by the coming by observing how, not on the delighton the crest of some

⚫been impossible

re of any passage in Rohere the idea itself is dis-out; but it is almost ee the bronze wolf in the recognising in it the iness the fierce and indomi. of its supposed sucklings. ision for the future ex me is well put in Gell's Rome, 11. 209.

but near a barren coast, under the shelter of a range of hills, forming a sufficient bulwark to protect its feeble infancy from the surrounding mountaineers, yet not so lofty or abrupt as to restrain the growth of its gigantic powers, when they were sufficiently matured to extend the outskirts of the actual city to the distance of thirty miles, and of its empire to the Atlantic and Euphrates. This remarkable and, as it may well be called, providential adaptation of the outward habitation to the inward soul of nations, is so important a province of historical investigation, and so evident a witness to the fact of an order and plan of moral government in the destiny of states, that it is not to be wondered at if more than ordinary attention has been paid to the topography of the most complete and striking exemplification of this idea that has ever yet appeared. For such Greece appears to be; and without giving her a higher part in the history of the world than was really hers, yet, so far as we can judge from the result, the peculiar part which she was called to perform would, à priori, dispose us to expect that a more than ordinary connexion would exist between her history and geography-that a nation which was to exhibit the highest possible perfection to which the unassisted human intellect could attain, should imbibe the largest possible share of all the purely natural influences which could work upon it—that a nation which was to fix the standard of taste and beauty for all countries and ages, should be endowed with a temper which should receive, and placed in a country which should suggest, all such images as should most conduce to this result.

It would be impossible to go through all the details of this connexion, or to point out precisely where it is an actual case of cause and effect, or where it is merely a case of illustration.— That there was a peculiar influence exercised over the character of the Greek states by the local features of their respective abodes, seems to be the real ground lying at the root of their favourite idea of indigenousness; chiefly applicable indeed to the Athenians, who most of all claimed it, but applicable more or less to all. In its most general form it appears in the instinct by which they received every native, and repelled every foreign, impression. The Romans imported art, manners, worship, from every quarter,— province after province with all its usages was incorporated into the

enormous mass of the empire; and yet for a time it beca without becoming unwieldly or distorted. In Greece, o hand, the slightest interfusion of the elements even of state or race with another, if they were not so transm process as in fact to become naturalized, acted like a and when the Macedonian, and afterward the Roman had extended itself over Greece, all her energies wer lyzed, and then destroyed for ever. What may hav influence of Egypt in the period which lies beyond history, it is of course difficult to determine-but h is the contrast between its visible traces as left in G Rome! In Greece, the only indisputable vestige remnant of a pyramid, of unknown date, still to be plain of Argos. In Italy, every traveller knows how of Isis is one of the most remarkable features amon of Pompeii, and how the city of the Caesars and t studded with the obelisks of Amenophis and Sesostri

This tendency, if it had not its first root, must have encouragement, in a peculiarity of Greek geography not always sufficiently consider, viz. its mountains. N poet more completely catch the distinctive feature o than Gray when he described Greece as a land Where each old poetic mountain Inspiration breathes around.

In the deficiency of forests, lakes, and rivers, in th Greece, it is precisely the exquisite outline of its mou venerable overhanging crags, their deep ravines, hoary w which form the real life and genius of the landscape. liarity of the Greek mountains is truly and simp Mr. Fellowes' description of those in Lycia: "I hav mountains so beautiful, so poetically beautiful. I re ing something of the same effect in those of Carra Spezia road, and again in Greece; and in each case t here, of marble. They have a craggy broken form silvery colour, which gives them a delicacy of bea contrast to the bold grandeur of the granite peaks land, or the rich beauty of the sandy rocks of Engl Minor, p. 189.) They also fix at once the limits a