in the dignity which became them, they must regard the resources of
their own land as nothing, and those of other countries as their
own." Added to this, the situation of Attica marked it out in an
eminent manner for a commercial country; and it became distinguished
beyond all the other states of Greece for its extensive commercial
relations, while its climate was deemed the most favorable of
all the regions of the civilized world for the physical and
intellectual development of man. It was called "a sunny land,"
and, notwithstanding the infertility of its soil, it was full
of picturesque beauty. The poet BYRON, in his apostrophe to Greece,
makes many striking and beautiful allusions to the Attica of his
own time:

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still its honeyed wealth Hymettus yields.
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare;
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

10. Entering now upon the isthmus which leads into Southern Greece,
we find the little state of Corinth, with its famous city of the
same name, keeping guard over the narrow pass, with one foot on
the Corinthian Gulf and the other on the Saron'ic, thereby commanding
both the Ionian and AEge'an seas, controlling the commerce that
passed between them, and holding the keys of Peloponnesus. It
was a mountainous and barren region, with the exception of a small