in which he used to conceal himself. By applying his ear to this hole he could hear distinctly every word that was spoken in the cavern. This apartment was no sooner finished than he put to death all the workmen who had been employed upon it. In this cavern he confined all those whom he suspected of being his enemies; and, by hearing their conversation, judged of their guilt, and condemned or acquitted accordingly.

The holes in the rock, where the prisoners were chained, still remain, and even the lead and iron in several of them.

The Cathedral, now dedicated to Our Lady of the Pillar, was the temple of Minerva, on the summit of which her statue stood, holding a broad refulgent shield. Every Syracusan, on sailing out of the port, was bound by his religion to throw honey, flowers, and ashes into the sea the instant he lost sight of this shield, to ensure a safe return. The temple is built in the Doric style, and with the proportions used generally in Sicily. Its exterior is one hundred and eighty-five feet in length and seventy-five in breadth.

The amphitheatre is in the form of a very eccentric ellipse; and the theatre is so entire that most of the seats still remain.

The great harbour ran into the heart of the city, and was called " Marmoreo," from its being entirely encompassed with buildings of marble. Though the buildings are gone, the harbour still exists in all its beauty. It is capable of receiving vessels of the largest burden, and of containing a numerous fleet. Although this harbour is at present entirely neglected, it might easily be rendered a great naval and commercial station.

The catacombs are a great work, not inferior to those of Rome or Naples, and in the same style.

There was also a prison called Latomiæ, a word signifying a quarry. Cicero has particularly de-

scribed this dreadful prison, which was a cave dug out of the solid rock, one hundred and twenty-five paces long, twenty feet broad, and nearly one hundred feet below the surface of the earth. He reproaches Verres with imprisoning Roman citizens in this horrid place, which was the work of Dionysius, and where he caused those to be shut up who had the misfortune to incur his displeasure. It is now a sort of subterranean garden.

The fountain of Arethusa likewise still exists. It was dedicated to Diana, who had a magnificent temple near it, where great festivals were annually celebrated in honour of that goddess. It is indeed an astonishing fountain, and rises at once out of the earth, of the size of a small river; and many of the people believe, even to this day, that it is the identical river Arethusa, which was said to have sunk under ground near Olympia in Greece, and that, continuing its course five or six hundred miles beneath the ocean, it rose again in this spot.

THEBES.

THE glory of Thebes belongs to a period prior to the commencement of authentic history. It is recorded only by poetry and tradition, and might be suspected as fable did not such mighty witnesses remain to attest its truth. A curious calculation, based on the rate of increase of the deposite of the Nile, and corroborated by other evidence, shows that this city must have been founded four thousand seven hundred and sixty years ago, or two thousand nine hundred and thirty before Christ. On the ruins of a temple is an inscription, stating that it was founded by Osymandyas, who reigned, according to M. Champollion, two thousand two hundred and seventy years before Christ.

Thebes was also called Diospolis, as being sacred to Jupiter; and Hecatompylos, from its hundred gates.

"Not all proud Thebes' unrivall❜d walls contain,
The world's great empress, on the Egyptian plain;
That spreads her conquests o'er a thousand states,
And pours her heroes through a hundred gates-
Two hundred horsemen and two hundred cars,
From each wide portal issuing to the wars."

ILIAD-POPE'S Trans.

"This epithet Hecatompylos, however," says Mr. Wilkinson," applied to it by Homer, has generally been supposed to refer to the hundred gates of its wall of circuit; but this difficulty is happily solved by an observation of Diodorus, that many suppose them to have been the propylæa of the temples,' and that this expression rather implies a plurality than a definite number."

Historians are unanimously agreed that Menes was the first king of Egypt. It has been supposed, and not without foundation, that he is the same with Misraim, the son of Cham. Cham was the second son of Noah. When the family of the latter, after the attempt to build the Tower of Babel, dispersed into different countries, Cham retired to Africa; and it was doubtless he who was afterward worshipped as a god under the name of Jupiter Ammon. He had four children, Chus, Misraim, Phut, and Canaan. Chus settled in Ethiopia; Misraim in Egypt, which is generally called in Scripture after his name, and by that of Cham, his father; Phut took possession of that part of Africa which lies westward of Egypt, and Canaan of the country which has since borne his name.

Misraim is agreed to be the same as Menes, whom all historians declare to have been the first king of Egypt, the institutor of the worship of the gods and of the ceremonies of the sacrifices.

Some ages after him, Busiris built the city of

Thebes, and made it the seat of his empire. This prince is not to be confounded with the Busiris who so distinguished himself by his inordinate cruelties. In respect to Osymandyas, Diodorus gives a very particular account of many magnificent edifices erected by him, one of which was adorned with sculpture and paintings of great beauty, representing an expedition against the Bactrians, a people of Asia, whom he had invaded with four hundred thousand foot and twenty thousand horse. In another part of the same building was exhibited an assembly of the judges, whose president wore on his breast a picture of Truth, with her eyes shut, and himself surrounded with books; an emphatic emblem, denoting that judges ought to be perfectly versed in the laws, and impartial in the administration of them. The king also was painted there, offering to the gods silver and gold, which he drew from the mines of Egypt.

So far back as this king's reign, the Egyptians divided the year into twelve months, each consisting of thirty days, adding five days and six hours to each year. To quote the words of a well-known writer (Professor Heeren), "Its monuments testify to us a time when it was the centre of the civilization of the human race; a civilization, it is true, which has not endured, but which, nevertheless, forms one of the steps by which mankind has attained to higher perfection."

Although Thebes had greatly fallen from its former splendour in the time of Cambyses the Persian, it was the fury of this lawless and merciless conqueror which gave the final blow to its grandeur, about 520 years before the Christian era. He pillaged its temples, and carried away the ornaments of gold, silver, and ivory. Before this period, no city in the world could be compared with it in size, beauty, and wealth; and, according to the expression of Diodorus, "The sun had never seen so magnificent a city."

The next step towards the decline and fall of this city was, as we learn from Diodorus, the preference given by the Egyptian kings to Memphis; and the removal of the seat of government thither, and subsequently to Sais and Alexandrea, proved as disastrous to the welfare as the Persian invasion had been to the splendour of the capital of Upper Egypt. "Commercial wealth," says Mr. Wilkinson, “ on the accession of the Ptolemies, began to flow through other channels. Coptos and Apollinopolis succeeded to the lucrative trade of Arabia, and Ethiopia no longer contributed to the revenues of Thebes; and its subsequent destruction, after a three years' siege, by Ptolemy Lathyrus, struck a death-blow to the welfare and existence of this capital, which was thenceforth scarcely deemed an Egyptian city. Some few repairs, however, were made of its dilapidated temples by Euergetes II., and some by the later Ptolemies. But it remained depopulated, and, at the time of Strabo's visit, was already divided into small and detached villages."

Thebes was perhaps the most astonishing work ever executed by the hand of man. In the time of its splendour it extended above twenty-three miles, and upon an emergency could send into the field, according to Tacitus, seven hundred thousand men; though Homer only states that it could pour through each of its hundred gates two hundred armed men, with their chariots and horses, which makes but forty thousand men, allowing two men to each chariot.

Though its walls were twenty-four feet in thickness, and its buildings the most solid and magnificent, yet even in the time of Strabo and of Juvenal only mutilated columns, broken obelisks, and temples levelled with the dust remained to mark its situation, and inform the traveller of the desolating power which time, or the still more destructive hand of tyranny, can exert over the proudest monuments of human art.