MURE'S TOUR IN GREECE.

Ma. Mese is a Scottish gentleman, who appears to have imbibed a taste for the classics and classical antiquities, from an education in Germany ; which he increased by after-cultivation. During a Continental tour in 1837, he felt the Grecian enthusiasm strong within him ; and, leaving his family at Florence, in the spring of 1838, he himself went by the steam-packet from An- cona to. Corfu. Passing thence by the first opportunity to the Cefalonian group, he busied himself in exploring Ithaca ; and, with Homer and the modern topographers in hand, he identifies, or endeavours to identify, the various localities in the realm of Ulysses commemorated in the Odyssey; and what is more in- teresting, if not more valuable, observes those customs of the het:9k age which the nature of the soil and climate still enforces after the lapse of three thousand years. Having exhausted Ithaca, our • author passed over to the mainland ; travelling by the only mode in Greece, the horse's back, and visiting in his tour the remains of the principal cities of the country, as well as the localities celebrated for great events. A mere enumeration of the chief places, in the order of their occurrence, will enable the geographer to follow the route of Mr. MORE; and the scholar to judge of its completeness. Be- sides towns or sites of minor celebrity, our author visited Delphi, Chaeronea, Thebes, Platsea, Athens, with an excursion to Mara- thon &c., Megara, Corinth, Argos, Sparta, and thence through Arcadia to Petra& Excepting an arched bridge, attributed by Mr. Mintz to the , primitive ages, and a few other matters of less importance the places visited and the ruins described have all been examined by classical topographers. In the sense of discovery, therefore, this Tow- in Greece is not a work of much importance : but it has con- siderable value and interest in other respects. Mr. MURE presents in a compact and readable form, an account of the present con- dition of the principal remains of the classical ages, (frequently illustrated by plans or sketches,) as well as of the impressions they leave upon the mind. From existing customs or natural features he illustrates many passages in classical authors ; and, mixing as he did with the people of the country in their khans and houses, he exhibits a pretty correct view of the present state of the people and of public opinion. So great a variety of topics natu- rally extends the work beyond what a mere personal narrative, or a topographical survey, or a critical illustration of the past from the present, would either have presented singly ; and the style of Mr. MURE depends for its effects upon an enumeration of par- ticulars rather than upon a few broad touches. Hence the com- position is the reverse of rapid ; slow, but not tedious. Mr. MURE has also a touch of the versifier, if not of the poet, and translates some of the passages he illustrates. Here is an instance.

ILLUSTRATION OF THE ODYSSEY PROM MODERN ITHACA.

The open arable land, of which there is, for Ithaca, a considerable extent just behind the town, gradually contracts as we asceud, until lost in the rocky declivities that close in upon both sides. Just where the blending of the fer- tile and barren soil takes place, the industrious peasantry were busy in extend- ing the frontiers of the cultivated region, by extirpating rocks, gathering loose stones, and building up terraces, on which the good soil is accumulated, and planted with vines and olives. This is an operation common throughout Greece and Italy, and indeed in all other rugged districts where a fine climate and a favourable exposure render the value of the land obtained more than an equivalent for the price of its redemption. It assumed, however, a more espe- cial interest in the present case, from haring been so pointedly noticed by the suitor Eurymachus, in one of the insolent harangues addressed by him to Ulysses in his disguise of mendicant, where, bantering the hero as a sturdy beggar and lazy vagabond, he tells him that were he willing to work he would provide him plenty of profitable employment-

" Friend, if to labour thou would'at turn thy baud,

Upon the outekirts • of my own best land. A fair day's wages thou might'st earn with ease, In gathering stones and planting goodly trees." —Odyss. xviii. 357.

There is no question that the particular image which HOMER had in view is missed by Poen, and we dare say by COWPER; for where a writer is ignorant of the life he is describing, he is apt to misin- terpret his original. In this case, a lucky moment and a know- ledge of the subject have enabled Mr. Mutts to excel genius and art.

• As evidence how little the most esteemed translations are often to be de- pended upon as representing the seirft of the original, it may be observed that the phrase of v. SA dypoi:, 17r icrxarair, which here forms the whole Pith of the allusion, has been entirely overlooked by both Pope and Cowper in f their version of the passage.

ROADS AND RAILROADS /II ANCIENT GREECE.

It is generally supposed, and to a certain extent .perhaps with justice, that the Greeks, amid all their advance in abstract science, were comparatively backward in some of the most important practical arts of civilized life, more especially in all that relates to interior communication by means of roads, bridges, &c. This was indeed in some measure a natural consequence of cer- tain peculiar features both of the geography of their native land and of their social system. In a country intersected in every direction by the sea, and in- habited by a people partial to a maritime life, the facilities of water-communi- cation would in some degree supersede the necessity of roads on a grand scale,. while the lofty mountain-ridges of the interior offered formidable obstacles to their construction. Other difficulties arose from the political subdivision of the Hellenic territory. Even under more favourable circumstances, the com- bination of numerous small bodies politic, for the purpose of great national undertakings, must always be attended with difficulty. But the interests and prejudices of the petty states into which Greece was separated hr these very mountain-ridges, disposed them perhaps rather to impede than to facilitate the regular traffic across them. Convenient roads for wheel-carriages through such a country could only be the work of a powerful empire; and even the great undertakings of the Romans seem to have been limited to cotnparatively level districts. Such routes as those which now lead across the Alps u ere reserved for the accumulated necessities and more extensive resources of modern civilization.

There are, however, many strong evidences, both of a practical and a awe- lative nature, that under all these disadvantages this branch of internal eco- nomy was, according to the use and fashion of the age, carried, even at the remotest period of antiquity, to a much higher degree of perfection in Greece than has usually been supposed. Travellers have long been in the habit of remarking the frequent occurrence of wheel-ruts in every part of that country, often in the remotest and least frequented mountain-passes, where a horse or mule can now with difficulty find a track. The term rut must not here be understood in the sense of a hole or inequality worn by long use and neglect in a level road, but of a groove or channel purposely scooped out at distances adapted to the ordinary span of a carriage, for the purpose of steadying and directing the course of the wheels, and lightening the weight of the draught, on rocky or precipitous ground, in the same manner as the sockets of our rail- roads. Some of these tracts of stone railway, for such they may in fact be called, are in a good state of preservation, chiefly where excavated in strata of solid rock. Where the nature of the soil was not equally favourable, the level was probably obtained by the addition of flags filling up the inequalities. It seems now to be generally admitted by persons who have turned their atten- tion to the subject, that this was the principle on which the ancient Greek carriage-roads were constructed on ground of this nature.

The robber bands, which under the Turkish rule overran the country, are fast disappearing in ninny places, the Government having taken them into pay as a sort of armed police. On the other hand, many of the peasantry engage in robbery on a smaller scale ; and are more difficult of detection, from the circumstance of their having an ostensible pursuit, which can be taken up as soon as the robbery is committed. The practice of the regular banditti was, and indeed is, of an organized kind, exhibiting as much care and skill in the pursuit as is displayed by a Red Indian in his wars ; and it will furnish a sample of Mr. MORE'S style when dealing with modern subjects.

GREEK THIEVES.

Several curious details respecting the habits of the Greek brigands in their more organized state were supplied me by some veteran Philhellenes at Argos, from experience furnished in the course of their own military career. Their system of organization is very complete. Each baud is distributed into three or at the most four classes. The first comprehends the chief alone, the second his officers, or more accomplished marauders, the third the remainder of the gang. The booty is distributed into a corresponding number of shares. The chief is entitled to one for himself, and each subdivision of his force to another respectively. As the number of each rank is in the inverse ratio of their merit, the emoluments of the various members are thus in the proportion of their services. When acting in detached parties, for the more ready cornniuni- cation with each other or with head-quarters, they have a system of signals ; which consists in piling stones in small cairns or pillars, conveying, according to their variety of form and arrangement, or the number of stones employed, like the ciphers of our telegraphs, each a different signification to the imtiated. When on the march and anxious to observe secrecy in their movements, they are careful never to follow the beaten track for more than a certain distance at a time; but every two or three miles the whole party strike off at separate tangents into the mountains, and remuster at a preconcertel point on a more advanced stage of their journey. While on the road, they travel in single file, one in front of the other; and the last two or three of each party drag a bush behind them to efface the mark of their footsteps in the dust. Similar precau- tions are taken at their bivouacs to destroy all trace of their movements. Their fires they manage in such a manner as to leave no black spot on the ground, by placing a thick layer of green wood below, on which the dry ia piled and lighted, as upon a hearth ; and before leaving the place, they lift the lower stratum in one mass, with the ashes on the top of it, carry it to some distance, and strew it in the recesses of the forest.

In laying their ambush, their tactic is to entrap their victims into the ve7 centre of their body, and then, starting suddenly out upon them from their lurking-places, to hem them in on every side with a chevaux-de-frise of muskets pointed at their breasts, so as to prevent the possibility of either resistance or escape. The travellers receive at the same moment (unless the object is to kilt or make prisoners, rather than mere plunder) the order to lie on their faces ; when a portion of the gang stands guard over them while the remainder dispose of their baggage. The art they possess of concealing their persons on such occasions, is said to be most extraordivary; doubling themselves up behind stones or bushes, often to all appearance scarcely large enough to cover their bodies, studying the form and colour of the surface of the ground, and adapting it to that of their own clothes, so that an inexperienced person might* even cast his eye over them and yet pass them unobserved like a hare

or rabbit in its form. One of my informants assured me that he had in one instance suddenly found himself encompassed by a body of a dozen or fifteen armed men, on ground where he could scarcely before have thought it possible a single one could have found a hiding-place; ec• that, on looking around

afterwards, it appeared almost as if his enemies had sprung up, like the Cad- mean heroes of old, from the bowels of the earth. Skill and boldness in the conduct of an ambush were as essential in the tactics of the ancient heroes as of the modern Kelphts ; and there can be little doubt that these very arts were as carefully studied and as successfully practised by a Diomcd as a Kolokotroni. The best precaution against tins danger is a little dog trained to range the ground in front of his master, and whose instinct will effectually baffle the utmost perfection of Kleplitic wisdom or ingenuity.