and Studies in Greece," just published by | Macmillan & Co., records his recent journey. It is from this work that we have taken the engravings which accompany this article. Any one having the prevalent vague notions of the geography of even the most important countries will, on looking at the map, be surprised to see how close the heel of Italy lies to Greece, and will be likely to think that the two countries are not nearly so far apart as he had supposed. The truth is, however, that. Italy and Greece are much more widely separated than they appear to be on the map. This is so, because the centers of Italian civilization are upon the west of Italy, while the centers of Greek civilization are upon the east of Greece. The two countries lie, as it were, with their backs to each other. The face of Italy looks toward France and Spain; the face of Greece looks toward Egypt and Asia Minor. Every great city of Italy, except Venice, approaches the west-Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Rome and Naples. All the great cities of Greece are upon the east-Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth and Argos. The coasts of Italy and Greece which look so near to each other are really out-of-the-way parts of the countries they belong to. Greece looked eastward in old days, so it continues to do now. This is because the Greece of modern days has been so long under the rule of the Turks. It was once really part of a great Asiatic empire, in which all the communications moved eastward. In expelling the Turks, the Greeks have not been able to rid themselves of the effects of so many years of Turkish control.

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It thus happens that if one wants to go from the real Italy to the real Greece, the nearest way is to take a ship at Naples and to sail round Italy and round Greece. This was what Mr. Mahaffy did. He tells us that for many hours after his vessel had lost sight of the Calabrian shores, and even of the snowy summit of Ætna, he sailed through an open sea with no land in sight. Told that the coasts of Greece would be visible by day-break, he started up at half-past three in the morning to get the first glimpse of the land. "It was a soft gray morning," he writes, "the sky was covered with light broken clouds and the deck was wet with a passing shower, of which the last drops were still flying in the air; and before us, some ten miles away, the coasts and promontories of the Peloponnesus were reaching southward and into the quiet sea." The long

ridges, in spite of their snow-clad peaks, did not appear lofty, and their rough outline did not look inharmonious. The color, save here and there a patch of snow, as on the ridge of Taygetus, was a deep purple. The traveler, who is an Irishman, was much struck by the strange likeness of the coast to the western and south-western shores of Ireland. He was not yet near enough to recognize the three headlands, which, as Strabo observes, give to the Peloponnesus the form of a plane leaf, but he could see the rocky and mountainous character of the country which caused that geographer to call the famous peninsula the Acropolis of Greece. The traveler likewise remembered the words of Herodotus, wherein he speaks of the soil as a "rugged nurse of liberty."

The vessel soon approached the promontory of Tainaron, and stood off the coast of Maina,-the home of those Mainote robbers, pirates and lovers whom Byron has made famous. (The reader of a book of travels in Greece, by the way, can not do better than to reread along with it "Childe Harold" and the "Giaour.") These Mainotes are now considered to be the purest in blood of all the Greeks. Their language is no nearer the old Greek than that of their neighbors, but they are the most beautiful in person, and the most independent in spirit of all the inhabitants of the Peloponnesus. Mr. Mahaffy records a very interesting incident which fell under his eye, as the ship neared the classic headland of Tainaron. It was near this very shore that Arion cast himself into the sea at the command of the sailor-robbers. Many musicloving dolphins, the story goes, had gathered about the prow upon which he sang his last song, and one of these carried him upon his back to shore. Just as Mr. Mahaffy's vessel approached Tainaron, the dolphins rose in the calm summer sea and came playing round the ship. They kept in with the course of the vessel, showing their quaint forms above the water, as if to convoy the voyagers into the seas and islands of real Greece. Strangely enough, in all the journeys which Mr. Mahaffy afterward took in Greek waters, he never saw dolphins again. The explanation probably is that the old legend was founded upon the liking of the dolphins for that coast, and that they still show the same preference. The dolphins were hardly left before the gulf of Sparta was open to the view, and the traveler saw before him the features of "hollow Lacedæ

ered with snow. There, too, upon its slopes were the very forests through which the young Spartans and their Laconian hounds used all day to hunt. The coast was quite deserted; the "wet ways," once covered with the "ants of the sea," as a Greek comic poet has called boats, now hardly showed a solitary craft. Turning to a Turkish gentleman standing beside him on the deck of the vessel, the traveler said:

"Is it not a great pity to see this fair coast so desolate ?"

"A great pity indeed," he said; "but what can you expect from these Greeks? They are all pirates and robbers; they are all liars and knaves. Had the Turks been allowed to hold possession of the country, they would have improved it and developed its resources; but since the Greeks became independent, everything has gone to ruin. Roads are broken up, communications abandoned; the people emigrate and disappear -in fact nothing prospers."

The same question being presently put to a Greek standing near, the answer was:

years, and that it was high time to see some fruits of recovered liberty among the Greeks.

No, it was impossible; the Turks had left the country in such a condition that centuries would be needed to redeem it.

But, indeed, the greatest of all the sorrows of the land neither the Turks nor the modern Greeks are responsible for; this is the utter depopulation of Greece. It was a calamity which came upon Greece almost suddenly, immediately following the loss of her independence, and which has as yet been only in part explained. Of the very Laconian coast along which Mr. Mahaffy's vessel passed, Strabo, writing about the time of Christ, said that "of old, Lacedæmon had numbered one hundred cities; in his day there were but ten remaining."

Dr. Schliemann's discoveries at Mycena were, of course, made after Mr. Mahaffy's visit. As Schliemann has turned over the results of his investigations to the museums at Athens, we look with interest to see what Mr. Mahaffy has to say about the Athenian museums. His verdict is, upon the whole,

German. This catalogue was useless in the following year. In many cases Heydemann was obliged, like the editor of Murray's "Hand-book," to describe the fragments by their position in the building in which they were placed. Even this is of no avail, as the buildings are often changed, and the position of the antiquities altered. Nevertheless, Mr. Mahaffy adds that every patient observer who examines with honest care the works, or fragments of works, which the Athenian museums offer; who will replace in fancy the tips of the noses, and stoop over recumbent statues and guess at the context of broken limbs, will agree that all the splendidly restored Greek work in Italian galleries is not worth a tithe of what may be seen at Athens. There are, indeed, not more than eight or ten statues which look as if they could be restored to the perfection of the "Mars" or the "Apoxyomenos' in the Vatican. But it is easy to see that some dozen figures-each of which is worth a thousand inferior works-can be saved from oblivion without taking any improper liberties with them. Mr. Mahaffy found that, notwithstanding all the drawbacks of the Athenian museums, it was far better that the statues should be seen there than elsewhere. The general judgment with regard to Lord Elgin's removal of the marbles to England has been that, though the manner of taking away these precious fragments was most careless and profane, the taking of them to a country where they are out of the way of war and domestic strife was a substantial benefit to art and civilization. Mr. Mahaffy said that this was his opinion until his visit to the British Museum after returning from Greece. Though he found the marbles treated with every care, shown to the best advantage, and explained by excellent descriptions, he found these wonderful fragments suffered so greatly by being separated from their temple, their country, and their lovely atmosphere, that he wished they had never been moved from their station on the Acropolis, even at the risk of being made a target by Turks and Greeks. Moreover, he was convinced that the few who would have seen them as intelligent travelers on the Acropolis would have more than gained in quality the advantage now diffused among the thousands who see them in the British Museum. The ornament is severed from its surface; the decoration of the temple is seen apart from the temple itself. Such a wrench in the associations of the objects weakens-very nearly destroys

their effect upon the untrained beholder. | Something like this is felt by visitors to the Museum who have not, like Mr. Mahaffy, the advantage of comparing the sculptures there exhibited with those to be seen on the Acropolis. Hawthorne evidently considered the remains a bore and a humbug. The writer of this paper, when on a visit to the British Museum, felt so painfully the want of any real sympathy with these famous fragments that he could only laugh when he saw an irreverent youth of his own party mount one of the empty pedestals, stand upon a single leg, make a stump of one arm, and brandish his umbrella among the warring torsos with the other.

Lord Elgin has of late years been thought an unjustly abused man; but he does not appear, from some accounts, to have got more abuse than he deserved. After he had obtained his firman from the sultan permitting him to take down and remove the sculptures, he appears not to have paid the least personal attention to the work, but to have left it in the hands of paid contractors. The traveler Dodwell was present at the time the work was done, and he says that, little as Greeks or Turks cared for the ruins, such a sense of the wickedness of the desecration was felt throughout Athens that the contractors were obliged to bribe workmen with additional wages to get them to do the work. Dodwell does not even mention Lord Elgin by name, but speaks of him as the "person" who defaced the Parthenon. This traveler beheld with especial disgust their method of proceeding when taking up one of the great white marble blocks which form the floor of the temple. They wanted to see what was underneath, and Dodwell, who was there, saw the foundation-one of Piræic sandstone. But when the inspection was finished, they left the block where it was, making no attempt at all to put it back into its place.

One misfortune which was not due to Lord Elgin's carelessness befell the marbles on their way to England. Two of the ships foundered off Cape Malea, which thus, even so late as 1815, re-asserted its classical fame for bad weather. There the marbles lie in ninety feet of water, and the ships are now said by the Greeks to have been discovered by fishermen off the coast. If it is possible, of course they should be recovered. The most perfect sculptures the world has produced ought not to be given up for lost while there is a chance to save them. But should they be recovered, to whom do they

belong? The Greeks have not the money to raise them, and no other nation would be disposed to perform the work for fear that Greece would claim the marbles as soon as they were high and dry. So that there does not seem to be much likelihood that any effort will be made to redeem them. All this, of course, is on the supposition that they can be redeemed. But of this, unfortunately, there is still much doubt.

It has even been feared that Greece will some day demand back from England the marbles now in the British Museum. Should there ever be such a state of society in that land as to insure their protection, it would probably be the wish of the world to see them back in Athens. But now that they have once been brought away, they ought to be kept in London until the Acropolis is in less danger from the bombshells of attacking forces, and until the Athenian museums are in better condition. Of the care taken by the Athenians of the remains still exposed, Mr. Mahaffy furnishes from his own observation some interesting examples. He saw tombs used as targets by the neighborhood, and peppered with shot and bullets. From the Acropolis he saw one young gentleman shooting with a pistol at a piece of old carved marble work in the theater of Dionysus. His object seemed to be to chip off a piece at every shot. Fortunately, Mr. Mahaffy, standing on the Acropolis, had the advantage of him in position, and recollecting the tactics of Apollo at Delphi, was able to put him to flight by detaching stones from the top of the precipice and rolling them down upon him.

Mr. Mahaffy's comments upon the art treasures of Greece are very able and very fresh. Among the most interesting parts of his book we may mention particularly the remarks upon the tombs, upon the archaic remains in the museums and upon the coloring of statues and buildings. The beautiful tomb in the Cerameicus, of which we present an engraving, exhibits as no criticism can the feeling of the old Greeks with regard to death. The sadness with which the Greek looked upon death was gentle and decorous, but it was profound. Both to the Homeric Greeks and the Greeks of the time of Pericles, the life to come was never anything more than a shadowy echo of the life upon earth. It is true that we find in Pindar thoughts of a brighter kind. But the poems of Pindar soon ceased to be popular, and his hope is but a single gleam amid the gloom of the