part in this portion of the Roman system, which the blessed Virgin is made to do in another. Christ is obscured, and their memory is dishonorably wronged." He leaned against the rigging of the vessel, overcome with very deep emotion; at last he said, "Time was when the Church loved her Lord; the time came when she began to fear Him: if at your home they would fain copy that primitive love, beware, my son, you be not familiar with Him. Yet must I say, and be not you high-minded, the wise and holy Roman Church has come to fear the Lord, Whom once she dared to love. Farewell! This is not a time for more words; they do but gender perplexity."

I sat, for a long while after he had left me, absorbed in thought. I was disturbed by the noise of persons coming on board. I looked up to Ancona, and said to myself with somewhat of fresh interest:-" This is a papal city."

It was a beautiful evening and a calm sea when we left Ancona, and we had pleasant views of the Italian coast till nightfall. We saw the far-famed church of Loretto on its heights above the sea. On the ensuing day we saw no land, except islands, and part of the coast of Apulia. We passed Pelagosa, leaving it some way to our right: on our left, we had very distinct views of Lissa, Cazza, Curzola, Lagosta, and some other islands above Ragusa, forming part of the long chain of islands which lie along the coast of Dalmatia. I felt as much pleasure in coasting by

these unhistorical islands, as if they had been places of a hundred associations. Great as the pleasure is which a traveller derives from a knowledge of history, that which arises from a knowledge of geography is even greater, though it does not admit of so much being said of it. It lies deeper, and lasts longer. Dalmatia, however, is not quite an unhistorical country; for that shore of the Adriatic which now furnishes Austria with fine tall mariners, once furnished Rome with a cluster of emperors, who seemed for a while to bring back the palmy days of her glory. In later times, the Dalmatian shore, about Spalato and Sebenico, was studded with magnificent villas. It was the retreat of the wealthy and elegant Romans, who consoled themselves in almost incredible luxuries for the absence of every social right and duty, which could alone have elevated them to the moral dignity of Roman citizens.

We passed close along the shores of Albania. The coast is very mountainous, and the hills barren, stony, and with a few exceptions, woodless. They belong, in point of scenery, to the same class of mountains as Blencathra in Cumberland, and present the same sort of scathed appearance. There was one particular point of view which, for a sea prospect, could hardly be exceeded. Albania was on our left, Fano and Merlera on our right, and the broad north end of Corfu facing us. Yet this view is far exceeded by the roadsteads of Corfu. There must be few such scenes in the world. With the exception

of one or two at Constantinople, we saw nothing so magnificent for a single view, as that from the rock at Corfu, standing on the top of the fortifications, and looking northward. Below is a beautifully shaped basin of blue sea, covered with the white sails of picturesquely rigged boats, with two or three men-of-war amongst them. The north promontory of Corfu and the wild high headlands of Albania lock one within another, catching on their different folds of green mountain-side various lights according to their distance, shutting the outlet of the straits, and giving the sea the appearance of a large and glorious lake. It is a most wonderful combination of mountain and water. The fortified rock itself, the Adriatic Gibraltar, is a beautiful object, from the quantity of luxuriant plants of every possible green, which cluster and wave from the crevices.

What traveller does not know the delight of getting among foliage whose shape and hue are not like that of his native land? The interior of the island of Corfu was to us a sweet foretaste of oriental foliage. We rode amongst strange hedges of huge cactus, fields of a blue-flowering grain, occasional palms, clouds of blue and white gum-cistus, myrtleshoots smelling in the sun, little forests of the manystemmed arbutus, marshy nooks of blossoming oleander, venerable dull olives, and lemon groves jewelled with pale yellow fruit. It was a dream of childhood realized, and brought with it some dreary remembrances barbed with poignant sorrows. Dreams

alas are never realized till the freshness of the heart

is

gone, and their beauty has lost all that wildness which made it in imagination so desirable.

Corfu is, indeed, a charming island, full of lovely views, rude mountain pictures, and most choice sea bays: but Albania and the roadsteads might be gazed at untired for ever.

I sat upon the deck of the Mahmudie, looking on the grey forehead of St. Salvador, and deciding, contrary to authority, that it could not be Istone, because of its distance from the site of the town. But my topographical perplexities were dispelled by the commencement of a vigorous cannonade from an English man-of-war. When I saw the smoke and the flash, and the balls ploughing up the bay, and throwing up white water-spouts, and heard old Albania with her hills at work, like some gigantic drums, and the echoes travelling fainter and fainter inland, and many an English flag stooping languidly from masthead or battery, I could not help thinking of what Shakspeare calls the revenges of the whirligig of time. Those ill-looking, meagre crowds, which line the shores, are the sons of Corinth's supercilious colonists. These blue glassy bays and those mountain sentinels of old Epirus, were, of a truth, the scene of that fearfully interesting and most bloody deed, the Corcyrean sedition. Little did Coeur de Lion dream, when he landed here on his return from Palestine, and kept the Feast of the Nativity, that in a few centuries

the children of the foggy rock beyond the gates of the west should be lords of fair Corcyra, and the head of a daughter of a barbarian house beyond the Rhine be the reverse of the flying horse of Ephyre upon the silver of these Ionian islands: while here and there a mutilated stone bears traces of the winged lion of St. Mark, a witness and memorial of Venice, a name passed away, but the wakes of whose vessels are still dimly to be seen upon the faithless Adriatic. I thought, too, as a scholar should, of the sadly faithful pages of Thucydides; but the Christian poet recalled me to a graver lesson. He bade me to remember, whenever I read of these acts of multitudinous carnage, crime, and suffering, that what history contemplates calmly, as masses, religion regards with awe, as individual souls, each this April day as much alive as I am, with all his hopes, fears, memories, about him, dwelling in the dark or luminous circle wherewith his own acts have encompassed him.

"I sat beneath an olive's branches grey,

And gazed upon the site of a lost town,
By Saint and poet chosen for renown ;
Where dwelt a race that on the sea held sway,
And, restless as its waves, forced a way

For civil strife a thousand states to drown.
That multitudinous stream we now note down,
As though one life, in birth and in decay.
Yet is their being's history spent and run,
Whose spirits live in awful singleness