time it became gigantic ad Sesostris. popes must have found great eography which we do tains. Never did any feature of a country land s, in the scenery of its mountains-their hoary with thyme,dscape. The pecud simply given in "I have never seen I remember seeI Carrara from the case they were, as n form and a gray of beauty quite in e peaks of Switzer of England.” (Asia imits and character of the Greek states. Every one of these was situated in a plain, bounded by mountains, whether entirely surrounded by them, as Orchomenus and Sparta, or on a long strip of coast, left by their receding from the shore, as in Elis and Achaia, or in plains of which the fourth side was open to the sea, as in Attica and Argolis. A solitary fortress or a retired sanctuary at times interrupted the intervening tracts of mountain-country, but otherwise, with the exception of the wild uplands of Arcadia and Doris, they seem to have been always very nearly as desolate as they are at present. Between one plain and another Pausanias has found almost as little to record as would a traveller of modern times". With these broad and rugged, as well as lofty walls, separating the nearest neighbours from each other, we can well conceive how the infant states would grow up in perfect isolation, especially in cases where they owed their origin to Eastern colonists, who would plant them as near the shore on which they landed as was consistent with safety from the pirates who then infested the Grecian seas. Each of these states thus secluded between the mountains and the sea, would, with the rapid development which seems one of the peculiarities of the Hellenic race, attain its full growth, and form its character, before any external influence could have reached it; and the moral barriers erected in the peculiarities of tastes and customs thus acquired, would be as impassable in the later, as the physical barrier had been in the earlier stages of its existence. Accordingly, every idea and institution would take its shape and colour from the atmosphere immediately surrounding it; the tendency to draw from native resources would be doubly encouraged; and whereas in modern times rarity has generally been made the symbol of honour and value, in Greece every thing seems to have been precious in proportion as it was of home-growth. It was the bay-tree of Delphi-the olive of Attica-the light green pine-tree of the Isthmus-the oleaster of Olympia-which in the eyes of these respective states was most reverenced and cherished. This may account for a fact to which allusion will be made again; viz. — that whilst the names of towns have mostly survived, those of the mountains have utterly perished. A brief but excellent sketch of the peculiar features of the plains and rivers of Greece may be found in Dr. Forchhammer's paper on the plain of Troy, in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. XII. p. 28. The sentiment of Aristotle, πάντα ὡς κάλλιστα πέφυ an echo in every Greek heart: whatever nature dict in a whisper, that they instantly heard and obeyed she seemed to forbid, that they looked upon with h triumph over natural obstacles was to them not pr but the reverse. Nero, in exact accordance with tha the Roman empire, of which he was the exaggerated tative, would have cut through the Isthmus; but t saw in it only a daring effort of impiety, deservedly by signs of Divine wrath. Near neighbours as were nians to the Boeotians, yet the guardian goddess of cording to the well-known legend) threw away in musical pipe, whose use was in fact almost peculiar t tian marshes, of which the most pleasing characteristi sists in the graceful stems and silvery tufts of the of reeds that first suggested the thought. Unexh easy of access as were the Pentelic quarries, and every Greek must have been with the magnificent which their materials were turned in the buildings yet, with a few exceptions, the temples in the rest seem to have been built of the rough stone of the neighbourhood. Corinth, the chief, if not the sole state of Greece, became so, not like Venice, by her in spite of her natural disadvantages, but by her maritime position in spite of herself. Boeotia yield a struggle to the stupifying and enervating influe fogs of her marshes and the fertility of her soil. Spa moulded her institutions into conformity with the among which she was placed: Σπάρταν ἔλαχες ταύταν the advice which the circle of enclosing mountains instilled into the legislator's mind-a fortress, and n she was by nature-a fortress, and nothing more, sh fore to be rendered by man. Lastly, Attica, as w most emphatically entitled to the glory of a local and character. It is impossible, after leaving any of t provinces of Greece, to stand at the mouth of any o tain-passes which command a view of the plain of not be struck by the contrast of the luxuriant vege κάλλιστα πέφυκεν, found nature dictated, even and obeyed; whatever pon with horror. To em not praiseworthy, ce with that spirit of xaggerated represenus; but the Greeks deservedly frustrated s as were the Athe we have left behind, with the naked hills and barren plain which we see before us, relieved only by the long stream of olives stretching down from Parnes to the sea. There we see the sterility by which Thucydides accounted for its early security and rapid civilization—there we see the Saronic gulf, with its islands, tempting it to maritime conquest7. Hence arose two of the most singular phases of Greek History, each without a parallel. In no other country have so many states existed without a federal union, or so vast a variety of character been developed within such narrow limits. What is true of the absence of internal communication in Greece by reason of its mountains, is true of the absence of external communication by reason of its sea. It is impossible to conceive a continental country more completely insular in its position than Greece. The girdle of islands which surround it -the deep inlets with which its coast is indented in all directions the almost impassable barrier which the wild population of the Albanian hills have in all ages opposed to access from the mainland of Europe in the interior-have made it a complete type of maritime geography. From the earliest times it was looked upon by the East as the "Isles of the Sea;" and in later times the names of "Isthmus" and "Archipelago," originally peculiar to Corinth and the Ægean sea, have become generic names in every part of the habitable globe. This watery barrier-whilst it certainly acted in the first instance as the means of conveying to the shores of Greece the more enterprising adventurers from without, and gave a vent to its own energies ddess of Attica (acaway in disgust the peculiar to the Booaracteristic still cons of the waving sea . Unexhausted and ries, and familiar as agnificent purposes to buildings of Athens, n the rest of Greece one of the immediate the sole commercial e, by her own spirit by her central and otia yielded without ng influence of the pil. Sparta at once th the rugged hills ς ταύταν κόσμει as untains must have and nothing more ore, she was therea, as we said, was ocal and indigenous ny of the adjacent of any of the mounlain of Athens, and nt vegetation which 7 What is true of Attica generally is also true of its subdivisions. The view from the top of Hymettus or Pentelicus at once discloses the character of those factions, whose names in themselves may seem to savour of confusion. The Pediai are evidently the occupants of the two flat plains of Athens and Eleusis -the only two plains, in the strict sense of the word (with the exception of the little plain of Marathon), which exist in Attica. Paralia, the long strip of land I. along the south-eastern coast, is flat, but so straitly pressed between Hymettus and the sea as to be little more than a broad beach. Mesogea (which retains its name) is the low table-land enclosed within the ranges of Pentelicus, Hymettus, and the long line of hills which run nearly from Marathon to Sunium, and is thus almost cut off from the sea; the Diacrii were the rough inhabitants of the low connecting highlands which unite Parnes with Pentelicus. 4 when they were sufficiently developed from within-y contributed to the independent growth of the seed o at an era when navigation was dreaded rather th as a channel of communication. If the study of Greek topography tends to fix i the nature of the limits of Greece, it also tends, mo than any thing else, to prevent our transferring to the notions derived from the vast dominion and c of modern or even of Roman times. The impre small size of Greek states, to any one who measur fairs by a standard not of physical but of moral g be the very opposite to a feeling of contempt. notions of greatness, as derived from mere magnit any place in the mind of one who has fully realiz the fact, that within the limits of a two days' journe tiges of four such cities as Sicyon, Corinth, Megara, and that the scanty stream of the Ilissus, the pu of Parnassus and Citharon, have attained a fam Missisippi and the Himalayas can never hope to thus learn also fully to appreciate the difficulty whi philosophers had in conceiving the idea of nationa state consisting of more than 10,000 citizens. We the vast importance which each individual must b in influencing the fortunes of the commonwealth, which must have been entertained against every aloof from public affairs, the success and rapidity revolution might be effected by means of a single massacre. In this point of view it may be worth while confusions which a knowledge or a sight of the 1 selves effectually obviates, viz. the application of notions to the navigation or the fortifications of a With regard to the first, it cannot be too often in the student of Greek geography, that, with the ex Alpheus, there is, we believe, no river in Greece admits of navigation even in boats. What is true is true, more or less, of all, that they are mere torr heavy rains, but throughout the greater part of Fom within-ye must of the seed once received, ed rather than welcomed ends to fix in our minds o tends, more powerfully ferring to Greek history ion and colossal power The impression of the no measures human afof moral grandeur, will contempt. No Hindoo -re magnitude, can find fully realized to himself days' journey lie the vesh, Megara, and Athens; sus, the puny mountains ned a fame which the er hope to equal. We fficulty which the Greek cens. of national unity in a We thus realize al must have possessed onwealth, the suspicion t every one who held rapidity with which a single confiscation or nwhile to notice two of the localities themtion of our modern s of ancient history. often impressed upon the exception of the Greece proper which is true of the Ilissus ere torrents, full after rt of the year ford able, and in summer many of them perfectly dry. They are, it has been truly observed by Dr. Ulrichs, óraμot, giving opportunity to drink, and no more. The names of " flumen" or "fluvius" are as little appropriate to them, as the ships which Statius introduces on the Ismenus. Under the same head may be considered the small dimensions of their harbours, which are well described by Dr. Arnold in his notes to Thucydides, viii. 96, when he compares them to the little basons in creeks of the Swiss and Italian lakes. Sometimes, as in the case of Syracuse and Pylus, if the bay of Navarino be indeed the harbour of Pylus, the modern and ancient notions would correspond; but the fact, that even in its earlier times Athens could have been satisfied with the little oval creeks of Phalerum and Munychia, is enough to indicate the vast difference between Greek and English navigation. The aspect of the Greek citadels reminds us no less forcibly that their original destination was not so much military, as social and religious-that their character was not that of a fortress for the accommodation of garrisons only, but in early times the seat of the infant city, and in all times the home of the ancestral gods of the people. Mitford's forgetfulness of this distinctionR naturally led him to the erroneous conclusion, that Epipolæ, as a higher point than Ortygia, must therefore have been the citadel of Syracuse, and that therefore Dionysius, as fixing his habitation in the latter, could not really have been a tyrant. In like manner, it is with difficulty that a traveller visiting Greece for the first time, can be persuaded (of what is undoubtedly the fact) that the long undulating promontory, south of the present town of Corfu, and not the two pointed peaks of the modern citadel, formed the old Acropolis of Corcyra; and the same notion would lead him. to believe, were the existing ruins destroyed, that the towering height of Lycabettus, and not the little square rock which nestles at its foot, was the Acropolis of Athens, did he not remember (what every hour of increased familiarity with the scene would of itself teach him) that it was according to the express statement of Thucydides, (11. 15), not only the citadel, but the original s9 itself. As shewn in Arnold's History of " 9 If we can carry back our thoughts into Roman antiquity, to the time when 4-2 as |