St. George's Hall 



to do with the adjacent country, to which it is only attached 

 by a low strip of tawny sand. On either side the leaden 



" Waters chafe to meet, 

 But pause and crouch beneath her feet. " 



This quotation led us to discuss whether Gibraltar was to 

 be considered the Corinth of the moderns, or Corinth the 

 Gibraltar of the ancients ; and then (as we entered St. 

 George's Hall, a great frontal sinus in the forehead of the 

 Rock), having been carried back upon history, we naturally 

 proceeded to carry ourselves forward upon futurity. It was 

 agreed, that as long as England lasted, Gibraltar would never 

 yield ; but that when Macaulay's " Australian native sat 

 upon his broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins 

 of St. Paul's," some civilised barbarian of somewhere else 

 might come to the deserted Rock. 



He will wind his way, in some fear of wild beasts, up the 

 galleries, and come to what some ancient record of the place 

 (for we will suppose him an antiquarian savage) informs him 

 " was called by that warlike nation, the Britons, the hall of 

 St. George, their patron saint, a fabulous warrior-god. I 

 dare say they sacrificed to him here, perhaps human victims, 

 for they mingled many barbarous customs of remotest anti- 

 quity with their faint and inefficient notions of religion." 

 Here he will stride across the cavern thoughtfully, as if to 

 measure its size, and stumbling over the rusty old remains 

 of a 32-pounder, awake from his reverie and continue, 

 "Truly, they must have hacked and hewed with great perse- 

 verance to hollow out these halls and passages in the solid 

 stone, and much energy and zeal were thrown away in the 

 worship of that once powerful but now broken-down demon, 

 War. In the days when the nations were so little aware of 



195 N 



