must be so, for Rome must frequent her harbours or starve. But the Athanasian and the Arian are deluging her streets with blood, and gorging them with slaughter, in their ruthless strife. Her ports are empty, her streets are desolate, her libraries and palaces are in decay. Amrou, with his hosts from the desert, has seized the depopulated town. For awhile she mourns in desolation, her prosperity for awhile has passed away, the Arab and the Abyssinian supplanted her, until the Caliph restored her ports, and invited the Christian and the Moslem, with equal privileges, with equal benefits, with equal hospitality, to the harbour of the reviving town. Alexandria breathes again; and although the bold mariners of the West have found a wider passage, Alexandria has been, and must be, a thriving town.

269. CARTHAGE AND ROME.-Almost the first communication which Carthage received from Rome as a considerable power, was the solicitation of her alliance against the king of Epirus, who threatened to trample down Italy with the Grecian phalanx and the Oriental machinery of war.

270. In the year B.C. 509, and again in B.C. 348, Carthage had entered into treaties with Rome; but inasmuch as they referred chiefly to the rights of navigation, to the mutual exclusion of the shipping of the two nations from certain districts of the coasts of each other and their respective allies, and as Rome had scarcely a harbour or a ship, it is just to infer that they were among the common form conventions between Carthage and the Etruscan States.

271. But the advance of the descendant of Achilles in support of the Sicilian and Tarentine descendants of Greece, united Carthage and Rome in a common cause. The western empires, as they may be deemed, entered into a defensive and offensive treaty. Carthage was to furnish the vessels of war, for the Romans had none to supply.

272. Punic faith observed the treaty, the vessels of Carthage defeated the Epirote's fleet; but Pyrrhus landed again in Italy. Rome repelled the elephants of India, the legions routed the phalanx (B.c. 274). Rome extended her empire,

the dynasties of Magna Græcia went down before her. She swelled with pride and ambition. Her first war with Carthage (B.C. 264) followed. She armed herself for the sea; she was at first victorious, from time to time baffled and defeated; but it was impossible that merchants with their mercenaries should vanquish the children of Mars. In 241 B.C. ended, in the discomfiture of Carthage, the first Punic war.

273. Sicily and the sea were the battle-fields. Rome aided Syracuse to enthral, and at length to enslave her.

274. The war with Carthage was terminated by treaty, which was violated by Rome. Sardinia (B.c. 237) rebelled against Carthage; Rome broke her contract and seized upon the coveted isle, and upon Corsica, which Etruria had ceded to Carthage; thus demonstrating the distinction between Roman and Punic faith.

275. Battles had bred warriors, and the princes of Carthage were inflamed with ambition and revenge. The loss of her sister-colonies excited the merchants. Sicily was almost ravished from her, Sardinia and Corsica were irretrievably gone. She associated or compelled her kindred colonies of Spain into schemes of ambition and conquest. Her aggrandizement there, and her confederations with other enemies of Italy, brought on (B.c. 218) the second Punic war. The Africans, the Spaniards, and the Gauls scattered the legions at Cannæ; the battalions of Hannibal threatened the imperial city, and Italy lay prostrate at his feet; but the genius of Rome prevailed. Carthage was vanquished (B.c. 201), surrendered her foreign possessions and her navy, and ransomed herself at an enormous price. Commerce redeemed the ransom; but Rome had elevated a ruthless and unscrupulous neighbour, and made him her ally, and an engine of disturbance and oppression to the devoted town.

276. The encroachments of Massinissa, and the perfidious plotting of Rome, involved Carthage in an inevitable invasion, called the third Punic war.

F

277. Carthage must be destroyed; Cato and Rome have decreed it (B.c. 149). Carthage had flourished as a trading city, but was now despoiled by the Numidian of half her African domain; even Utica had revolted, to evade the terrible decree. Rome had become the mightiest of nations; in the fields of Gaul, of Greece, of Asia Minor, and Spain, her armies had acquired the perfection of discipline, and often victorious, became trained to carnage and rapine, and ruthlessly ready to execute any judgment which would bring them spoil. Carthage was rich, but powerless. Unable to compete with an African prince, she could no longer encounter the legions; she could only fight the battle of desperation, she could not avert her doom.

278. In 146 B.c. perished the daughter of Tyre and Sidon, the mother of colonies, illustrious for the diffusion of wealth and the blessings of commerce, as Rome was famous for devastation and the glories of war. Forced at first by the Sicilian Greeks, and afterwards by Pyrrhus and Rome, to depart from her peaceful vocation, and to resort to the congress of arms, she proved unequal to the conflict, was humiliated in her first war with Sicily, vanquished in her first war with Rome, plundered in the second, and in the third perfidiously destroyed.

279. And when she fell, though her glory and her sovereignty had long before departed, and her commerce had greatly decayed, the circuit of her walls was twenty-three Roman miles; her inhabitants were seven hundred thousand, industrious and wealthy, not like the pauper-pensioned inhabitants of Rome. The magnificence of what they had ruined astonished the barbarians who despoiled her; but the description of her harbours, her docks, and her quays, the palaces of her merchants, and the habitations and manufactories of her citizens, must be sought elsewhere.

280. BRITAIN. Before the voyage of Hamilco, perhaps before Carthage was built, from Carteia, or Gadir, the Phonicians visited the English coasts. From that period the

Tyrian settlers in the west, and possibly ships from the parent state, obtained from the Cassiterides the much-appreciated tin. If these were the Scilly Isles, it is not credible that vessels which crossed the sea to visit them did not search for all the products obtainable along the adjacent coasts. The Phoenicians and their descendants did not for centuries confine their commerce to a single subject or a single point. We may feel assured that whatever could be procured in the southern regions of England, perhaps in its western, and on the opposite Irish lands, worthy of transport to Syria, to Africa, or Spain, found its value in eastern merchandise, and stowage in Phoenician ships.

281. For many centuries Tyre and her children kept the precious commodity to themselves.

282. About this time (B.c. 300) colonists or agents of the Massilians had established themselves on the Continent, in Brittany, opposite the English coasts. They purchased the tin from the far west, at an island called Mietis, perhaps St. Michael's Mount, conveyed it along the southern coasts, and, to avoid the Punic cruisers, overland to Marseilles, for distribution to Italy and the eastern world.

283. Before this (B.c. 314) Pytheas, a navigator from Marseilles, had coasted at least one side of Britain and its northern isles, and penetrated some distance up the Baltic, whence he carried back unquestionable evidences of his voyage.

284. As Carthage waned and fell, the British commerce passed to the merchants of Marseilles and their colonists and agents on the Gallic shore.

285. There is no history, in these ages, of the north of Gaul. From time to time we obtain a glimpse of the coast, and a vague notion as to what its inhabitants then were; but through what phases they had since the last inspection passed, will ever remain untold.

286. The Veneti (B.c. 100) were settled in the north-west coasts of Gaul (Brittany), and carried on the traffic with

the English, in Kent and at Mietis, in tin and lead, and the paltry pearls which tempted Cæsar, and corn, cattle, hides, and slaves, paying for them with implements for agriculture, trade, and war, and the luxuries and finery in which the half-reclaimed savage delights.

287. The Veneti were probably descendants from Massilians, blended with the people among whom they came, as the Massilians were the descendants of the intermixture of Gauls and Greeks. They were regarded by some as a Belgic, by others as a Batavian race. They had (B.c. 55) grown powerful on the sea, they had imposed a transit duty on foreign craft. Their ships were of oak, proof against the rostra of the Roman galleys; high fore and aft, their stems overlooked the castles on the Roman decks; their sails were of leather, and their cables were formed of iron.

of war.

288. ANCIENT SHIPS.-We have already given, from Macpherson, a description of an ancient Mediterranean ship Naval architecture in this department had not greatly improved. As many experiments as in modern. times, but not in such rapid succession, or on so large a scale, had been tried. The number of banks of oars had been from time to time increased; and again, from time to time the larger vessels had been razed and cut down; but in the latter part of the third century before the Christian era, they began to construct ships for transports, for palaces, and for trade, almost as unwieldy, and quite as uncouth, as any prodigies of modern times. Hiero, King of Syracuse, with the help of Archimedes, constructed a galley of twenty tiers of oars, carrying three masts, adorned and embellished as a palace, and surmounted with a castle and fortifications. Ptolemy built two rival monsters, one for the river, the other for the sea; the former 300 feet long and 45 broad, the latter 420 feet long and only 57 broad, each furnished with two heads and two sterns, like an edifice erected on two New Zealand war-canoes or river-scows. The latter carried 4000 oars, in 40 tiers, and affected to accommodate