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Ithaca, which retains its ancient name*, is about seventeen miles in length, and of very irregular breadth, though in no part exceeding five miles. It is composed almost entirely of two masses of rock, Mounts Neritos and Stefano, connected by a third smaller one, called Mount Aetos, or Aito. Ithaca is rendered peculiar in its appearance, by the bay to which we have alluded, which runs inland, to such a depth, as almost to divide the island. The scenery is in general rugged, though occasionally rendered in a high degree picturesque, by the groves of olive which fringe the sides of the mountains, and by the evergreens and wild flowers which protrude themselves through their crevices. Vathi, or Bathi, the modern capital, is situated about two miles to the west of the supposed site of the old town, at the farther extremity of a deep inlet; it is in a great measure composed of a single street running along the shore, and contains about 2300 inhabitants. The population of the whole island is rated at 8000. The Ithacans are strongly addicted to maritime pursuits, and are daily extending the sphere of their commerce. The education of the upper ranks is better than that of most of the other islanders, and their manners, as a natural consequence, are more courteous and engaging.

To the north of Ithaca lies Santa Maura, the Leucadia of antiquity, of a figure somewhat triangular, measuring thirty miles from north to south, and about twelve from east to west, composed almost entirely of a continued mountainous chain of great height, running north and south, and which is broken on the north-west into almost perpendicular cliffs of the most dazzling whiteness; it is still frequently designated by its ancient name † This chain, however, is traversed at several points by inferior ones, on whose sides are seen many populous villages, beautified by the presence of the vine, the olive, and the sweet-blushing almond, the smiling productions of a rugged mother. Though the present appearance of Leucadia is in many respects at variance with the accounts of ancient authors, yet no one, perhaps, of the seven islands, save Ithaca and Corcyra, possesses more interesting and less disputable memorials of its ancient greatness and importance. United originally to the continent, it was divided from it by an artificial channel, cut by the commercial and enterprising Corinthians ‡. This channel, which in former times served, in all probability, as a passage for the vessels laden with the productions of the islands or the continent, or for many a

* The Vulgar call it Theaki.—Gell. * Πέτρα γάρ ἐσι λευκὴ

ὡς ἐντευθεν τοὔνομα λαβεῖν.--STRAB. X.

STRAB. Lib. x. Liv. xxxiii. 17.

gallant trireme whose purpose was less pacific*, is now often so shallow, as to be useless for maritime purposes, and in many places is not more than one hundred yards across. The sites of

the two ancient cities Leucate and Ellomenos have been discovered, though much of the ground which they occupied has become the territory of the olive. Many parts of the walls of Leucate have been traced with great precision; whilst several scattered blocks of marble and quadrangular masses of stone, remain as evidences of the havoc created by the Roman éngines under Flaminiust. In the same neighbourhood a large cemetery has also been discovered, which was found to contain several pieces of bronze and articles of ancient pottery, with coins of different ages. A part of the island, and that not the least interesting, remains unaltered by the hand of time. We allude to the ancient Leucas, from which, as poets tell, the unhappy and devoted Sappho cast herself into the ocean which rolls below it, and extinguished at once her passion and her life. Love heard not her prayer-no wing was spread to break her fall, and vainly did she call on gentle gales to

Blow,

And softly lay her on the waves below.

The promontory of Leucas, or, as it is now called, Cape Ducato, is situated at the most southern point of the island. It is a rugged cliff, rising to the height of about 115 feet above the sea§. A few paces nearer its extreme point than the spot supposed to have been the scene of Sappho's leap, are to be seen some ruins which are conjectured to be those of Apollo's Temple; and this conjecture is strengthened by the late discovery of some broken walls which are supposed to be remains of the " parva urbs" of Virgil. The present population of the island is estimated at 22,000. The modern capital, distant about two miles from the seat of the ancient one, is called Amaxichi. Its situation is unhealthy, and the streets are narrow and ill built; they are, however, decorated by several gay shops, which are mostly kept by native Albanians. The revenue of the island arises from the olive, which is here very prolific, from grapes, and from the making of salt. There is scarcely any corn grown, and the deficiency of pasture is still greater than that of the arable land.

* Vide THUCYD. iv, 1.

OVID. Sapph. Phaon. v. 204 sq.

+ LIV. xxxiii. 17.

"The altitude of Leucas," says Dr. Holland, "is not great; sufficiently so, however, for the purpose to which the ancients put it."

|| ÆN. III. 275, 276.

The scenery of Santa Maura is often highly striking and picturesque, while, from some of its more elevated points, the spectator is presented with views as magnificent as any on which the eye can rest. To the northward may be seen the whole land of Cephalonia; part of the rugged Ithaca; the romantic scenery of the Bay of Arta; and the "beaked" promontory of Actium: whilst, to the eastward, rise the snow-topped mountains of the ancient continent.

To the south of all the other islands, and at the very entrance of the Archipelago, lies Cerigo, formerly Cythera. Its natural history may be told in few words. Of an oval form, and measuring seventeen miles from north to south, and ten from east to west, it contains about 10,000 inhabitants. The climate is unhealthy, and the soil unproductive; hence, the natives have been led, necessarily, to maritime pursuits; for which the situation of their island, at the confluence of two seas, is admirably adapted. The manners of the people are of the same rough and uninviting nature with their soil; so that, from this cause, combined with the distance of the island from any of the others, their abode in Cerigo is not unreasonably esteemed a species of banishment by the British troops who are stationed there. Turning from Cerigo, as it now is, to the consideration of its past history, we are first met by the grateful illusions with which fable has clothed it; for it was to the shores of this island that Venus was wafted by the zephyrs, after she had arisen, in smiles and beauty, from the foam of Ocean; and here, in after times, a stately temple marked the devotion of the inhabitants, and the honour in which the goddess was held. Descending from the ages of fiction, we next find Cythera in the hands of the Lacedæmonians, with whom it remained till the eighth year of the Peloponnesian war; when Nicias, landing at the head of a body of Athenians, took the island, and, for some untold reason, put the Lacedæmonians, who had capitulated, to death. It afterwards fell, successively, under the power of the Egyptians and Romans, and was ultimately taken by Venice, from which period it followed the fate of the other islands.

MODERN FRENCH COMEDY AND ELEGY*.

Ir there be any species of creative literature that could hope for a continued and living existence, it is comedy. Every other species, of poetry at least, if we except that of pure imagination, has a certain and definite stock of material which does not reproduce itself in proportion to its exhaustion. The domain of human passion is limited, and was never, perhaps, beyond the intellectual horizon of a man of feeling in any age. The period and experience of any one man's life is sufficient to represent and teach all its varieties, and two centuries of civilization could not pass without displaying it fully in all its shades and phases. Thus we find in the very earliest ages the great divisions of passion known, established, and even personified. No wonder then, that in a state of existence of some thousand years, any kind of passion has become rather a common-place theme. It may certainly be asserted in proof of the inexhaustibility, if we may be allowed the expression, of serious poetic feeling, that there never was an age in which poetry wore a more original aspect than at present. But this very original and sublime poetic feeling that marks the age, is by its nature the great proof of what we advance. It consists chiefly in a negation of all that ever went before it, in a bold heresy against the feelings and opinions of mankind. It is not a new land discovered, not a new piece added to the web of poetic feeling, but it is rather the old web reversed. It is the revulsion of genius back upon itself, after being repelled in its ambitious attempts to overleap established bounds. It was, perhaps, the sole resource left for a great poet, the sole principle of originality unoccupied; and as such, it is the copestone, the entablature of the poetic fabric, that precludes any further elevation,

In the progress of civilization the pure passions, which form the proper subjects of the epic and the tragic muse, become modified and frittered down to feelings and whims no longer worthy the name of passion; and thus modified, they become the proper subject of comedy. Society exhausts the stock of the tragic, whilst it hourly and abundantly multiplies that of the comic muse. Notwithstanding this, in all the countries of Europe, Spain perhaps excepted, the comic drama has been much less successful, much less perfectionnated than the tragic.

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It can boast fewer chef-d'œuvres, and has remained in far longer intervals of decadence. Italy does not possess a single good comedy; and if Goldoni has recorded that he wrote sixteen of his pieces in one season, it is the activity of his pen and fingers we admire, not that of his brain.

It

The forte of French literature is said to be their comedy. may be so; and we do not think much of it; nor does the frank opinion of Schlegel, "that Moliere had no genius," which so astounded the French admirers of the German critic, at all amaze us. Moliere was a great moral poet, though not a deep one; he was an acute observer of man in all the phases of society that came before him; he possessed wit, vivacity, and a language formed to express every shade of social feeling, foible, satire; but he had no invention, no deep, or more than ordinary passion; none of those great qualities, in fine, that stamp a genius dramatic par excellence. Had his comedies, at least the serious ones, been moral epistles, they had been unrivalled in their kind—but they possess no dramatic spirit. The principal and leading characters, the miser, the misanthrope, the hypocrite, are mere pure abstractions, to conceive which never required invention. And he has brought them on the stage as cold, abstract, and untempered, as if they were still but the subjects of the moral or the apophthegm. There is no individuality bestowed on them by the poet, no parental mark, by which they might be distinguished from any other of their kind. If a boy were ordered to compose a comedy, of which a religious hypocrite was to be the principal personage, he would make him the same, blank, unshaded hypocrite as Tartuffe, and would just draw him the same unmingled villain without relief. Nor could the school-boy conduct the piece with greater improbabilities than the blindness of Orgon, &c.; and the untaught boy would certainly have recourse to the same convenient denouement-the interference of absolute wisdom and power to dissolve the difficulty, and give a moral finale to the piece. It is above all wonderful that Moliere did not possess the acquirable art of managing the action of a drama, and giving at least a probable denouement. But he lived and wrote for the court of a despotic prince, when the ever-so-strange and unexpected interference of power in the solving of knotty cases was, perhaps, customary and natural.

Wanting, then, the lower as well as the higher qualities of a great dramatist, how does Moliere support his character? By his excellence as a moral poet and a satirist; if not by developing character, like our great dramatists, at least by depicting them no wise inferior to our Pope. To us Moliere's Misanthrope' presents nothing so comic as Celimene's satirical description

VOL. III. PART II.

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