The Press.
London, England, 1858-07-10 00:00:00

nature. What the aforesaid Timon may have been we have
no meant of knowing. His contemporaries would not
listen to him, and he had no reading public to fall back
upon, composed of persona who once a year, according to
the fashion, forsook the city and wandered about the moun•
tains, Timone for the nonce.

The chapters on Tegea, Mantinea, and
Tripolitza are chiefly topographical or political ;
but the following passage describing the view
over the plain of Sparta cannot fail to be read
with interest :

Through the valley looking eastward ran a narrow
stream, the ancient (Enna, along a broad gravelly bed,
fringed with plane•ttees. On the level ground by the
banks, and on the lower slopes of Mount Farnon beyond,
were green cornfields mixed with red, newly-ploughed
fellows ; and higher up on the hillsides pasture grounds
dotted with white flocks (from which the sound of many
tinkling sheep bells came borne upon the wind), inter•
spersed with thickets of holly, lentisk, arbutus, and the
yellow broom, and broken by pinnacles of grey rock.
Where the watercourses swept down to the valley there ran
as it were a s ream of richer, greener foliage, thickening,
widening, and deepening, as it descended. We were loath
to leave so beautiful a place, even for the greater beauties
in store fur ns. At eight o'clock we set off. Our patti,
constantly ascending, wound through a wood, or rather
shrubbery, with fresh green leaves " fulfilled with lite and
prodigal of song." Now the branches interlacing seemed
to bar the way, now the thicket opened and left a green
glade all blazing with scarlet anemones ; while the winding
path was recessed into many a shady covert starrsd with
shy woodland dowers on which the dew lay till noon. A
jubilant clamour of singing birds—nightingale, thrush,
linnet—mized with notes that were unfamiliar, rang round
us on all sides. All sights and sounds reminded us that
we were in the prime of " scarlet•blosso►ned spring," and
recalled and justified 'the fond epithets which ell poets of
all ages have heaped upon the youth of the year.
Atter attaining the summit of the pass, and as one
descends through winding paths on the western side,
beauties of quite another kind present, themselves. Instead
of a succession of f►rest glades and alleys—dainty vig-
nettes—we have before us a wide prospect of mountain
scenery—a panorama on a scale of magnificence, which,
except among the high Alps, cannot be paralleled in Europe.
And seen iii the early spring, when the summits and
ridges between are still covered with a continuous robe of
snow, Taygetus presents to the eye and the imagination a
picture which loses nothing by a comparison with the re-
collections of Mont Blanc or the Oberland of Berne. From
the main chain, here visible almost from one ectl to the
other, huge masses project at regular intervals, descending
by a succession of precipices to the plain—like a great
Titanic wall flanked with buttresses and cumbered about
its base with immemorial rain. A rare verdure clothes
the hollows and the slopes between, and at the foot
stretches the plain of Spam, green with mulberry, olive,
maize, and vine, seamed here and there with red scars,
the crumpling earthbanks between which flow the Eurotas
and its tributaries.
Among the classical sites in the Morea which
Mr. Clark visited, none is more interesting than
Messene, both on account of its glorious historical
associations, and from the circumstance that the
walls, an excellent specimen of Greek masonry,
were built under the direction of Evaminondas,
and remain extremely perfect to the present day.
We can do no more than direct attention to this
chapter, which is one of the most attractive in
the book, and must merely refer to the pic-
turesque glimpses of scenery elsewhere inter-
spersed ; the rich forests clothing the sides of the
dove-coloured limestone mountains; the "sandy
Ladon's lilied banks"; the thickets of oleander
and lentisk ; and the spreading plane-tree, beneath
which the traveller eats h►s noonday meal, by
the side of some clear, dark pool, fringed,
according to the poetical Greek expression, with
lashes of waving fern. But there are two points
to which it will be well to advert. One of these
is the author's account of Sphacteria, in which he
successfully combats the view which Dr Arnold
attempted to substitute for the received notion
about the locality. The latter maintained that
the long narrow island, now called Sphagia, is
not the scene of that famous capture of the
Spartans, by which Cleon made good his rash
vaunt at Athens; but that Palaio Navarino is
the real Sphacteria, and that it has only become
a peninsula through the subsequent deposit of
sand. After mentioning the objections to this
view urged by Mr. Grote and others, our author
remarks that in viewing Koryphasium (i.q. Palaio
Navarino, or Pylos) as an island, for the sake of
getting two channels narrow enough to fit the
description of Thucydides, Dr. Arnold has for-
gotten that a third, and by far the widest, channel,
that, namely, between the south end of Sphagia
and the mainland, would thus remain, and that this
would have been quite open to the Athenians.
lie accounts for the discrepancy between the
actual measurements and the statements of the
historian by supposing that Thucydides had never
been there, and was misinformed, and that, at
any rate, the closing up of the channel was never