274 THE MEDITERRANEAN, PHYSICAL AND HISTORICAL. 



Cyrene almost rivalled Carthage in commercial importance. The 

 Hellenic ruins still existing bear witness to the splendor of its five great 

 cities. It was the birth-place of many distinguished people, and amongst 

 its hills and fountains were located some of the most interesting scenes 

 in mythology, such as the Gardens of the Hesperides, and the "silent, 

 dull, forgetful waters of Lethe." 



This peninsula is only separated by a narrow strait from Greece, 

 whence it was originally colonized. There, and indeed all over the 

 eastern basin of the Mediterranean, are many little-trodden routes, but 

 the subject is too extensive ; I am reluctantly compelled to restrict my 

 remarks to the western half. 



The south of Italy is more frequently traversed, and less travelled in, 

 than any part of that country. Of the thousands who yearly embark 

 or dis embark at Brindisi few ever visit the land of Manfred. Otranto 

 is only known to them from the fanciful descriptions in Horace Wal- 

 pole's romance. The general public in this country is quite ignorant of 

 what is going on at Taranto, and of the great arsenal and dockyard 

 which Italy is constructing in the Mare Piccolo, an inland sea contain- 

 ing more than 1,000 acres of anchorage for the largest ironclads afloat, 

 yet with an entrance so narrow that it is spanned by a revolving bridge. 

 Even the Adriatic, though traversed daily by steamers of the Austrian 

 Lloyd's Company, is not a highway of travel, yet where is it possible to 

 find so many places of interest within the short space of a week's voy- 

 age, between Corfu and Trieste, as along the Dalmatian and Istrian 

 shores, and among the islands that fringe the former where it is diffi- 

 cult to realize that one is at sea at all, and not on some great inland 

 lake? 



There is the Bocche di Cattaro, a vast rent made by the Adriatic 

 among the mountains, where the sea flows round their spurs in a series 

 of canals, bays, and lakes of surpassing beauty. The city of Cattaro 

 itself, the gateway of Montenegro, with its picturesque Venetian fort- 

 ress, nestling at the foot of the black mountain, Kagusa, the Koman 

 successor of the Hellenic Epidaurus, queen of the southern Adriatic, 

 battling with the waves on her rock bound peninsula, the one spot in 

 all that sea which never submitted either to Venice or the Turk, and 

 for centuries resisting the barbarians on every side, absolutely unique 

 as a mediaeval fortified town, and worthy to have given her name to the 

 argosies she sent forth ; Spalato, the grandest of Koman monuments ; 

 Lissa, colonized by Dionysius of Syracuse, and memorable to us as hav- 

 ing been a British naval station from 1812 to 1814, while the French 

 held Dalmatia; Zara, the capital, famous for its siege by the Crusaders, 

 interesting from an ecclesiological point of view, and venerated as the 

 last resting place of St. Simeon, the prophet of the Nunc dimittis ; 

 Parenza, with its great basilica ; Pola, with its noble harbor, whence 

 Belisarius sailed forth, now the chief naval port of the Austrian Em- 

 pire, with its Koman amphitheater and graceful triumphal arches, be- 



