of the GrcBco-Roman Era in certain ancient Sites of Asia Minor. 157 



worthy of being inserted here, as it leads at once to the restoration of an inscrip- 

 tion which Mr. Fellows has copied from a grave in the same cemetery, but in a 

 form which, I must be pardoned for observing, it would be difficult for the 

 original engraver to recognize.* 



I mention this also in illustration of the remarks on the subject of mechanical 

 copying with which I commenced this memoir. The particular comment I re- 

 serve for a more suitable place than the pages of an abstract like the present. 



I have thus conducted the audience which I have the honour of addressing, 

 through those celebrated localities, the bare mention of the names of which 

 awakens emotions of the deepest kind in the Christian's heart. However 

 interesting their records — those I mean of their heathen state — may be in 

 themselves, as conducing to the illustration of their history, their social insti- 

 tutions, or their local characteristics, I must for one confess, that such are 

 not the sole causes which invest them in my eyes with their gorgeous and 

 attractive drapery. I may say, with truth, that I never passed an hour within 

 their mouldering palaces, their ruined halls, their prostrate shrines, their now 

 silent and forsaken agorae, their theatres, or their gymnasia, without the one 

 absorbing reflection being present to my mind, that over these the beloved 

 apostle of the blessed Jesus had exercised a spiritual rule, that here the apoca- 

 lyptic angels had preached, and that within these precincts they had received 

 those portentous warnings which but too truly, too faithfully, preluded the 

 fate of their communities. There is an air and a sense of indescribable 

 grandeur in those distant solitudes (for three of their number can be called by 

 no other name), a grandeur incomparably superior to all that civilization, art, 

 wealth, prosperity, could have bestowed on them. How is this ? We know how 

 difficult it is in the generality of cases to subject emotions to exact measures, or 

 to reason with a geometrical precision on their causes ; but here there is no 

 occasion for any refined disquisitions. The very causes which are every day 



* Travels, &c., vol. i. pp. 127, 323. 



