that by which the life of all tyrants is followed, the execration of posterity.' At the idea of a revolution, however, the author starts with horror, on recollecting the calamities which have lately been brought on his own country; and he affirms that nothing but the excess of slavery, under which a nation is oppressed, can for the future justify any attempt to overturn its government, M. Sonnini then proceeds to paint the flourishing state of the French commerce in the Levant during the war of 1778; its subsequent total ruin, which brought on that of Marseilles; with the causes of these misfortunes, &c. and he represents the authority of the Porte as absolutely extinct in Egypt. The islands of the Egean sea are particular objects of our traveller's researches ;-those numerous groups of lands and rocks, promiscuously scattered throughout that sea as an eternal monument of its depredations on the Continent, which were divided by the antients into Cyclades and Sporades: denominations now no more remembered, as they at present are known only under the general designation of the islands of the Archipelago. As most of these islands, which are remarkable for the beauty and the fertility of their soil, celebrated by the writers of antiquity, and famed for having given birth to great men, are still important points of establishment, communication, or commerce, we have a great interest in gaining a thorough acquaintance with them. On his return from Upper Egypt, M. Sonnini arrived for the third time in Alexandria. The extreme circumspection, which he there found Europeans obliged to employ in all their proceedings, no longer allowed to hope for any new researches. Accordingly, he soon resolved to quit a tract of sands and ruins, the barren abode of ignorance and barbarism, which the traders of Europe could not occupy without being a prey to perpetual apprehensions and exposed to frequent dangers; while their vessels were liable to shipwreck, in the bad and only harbour that was open to them. He therefore laid aside the long and ample garments in use among the Orientals, and which he had worn during his travels in Egypt, to resume the French uniform; in which, however, he at first found himself very uneasy. He says that he long regretted a dress, not so light indeed, but certainly more grand and decorous, and at the same time better calculated for preserving health; because, not compressing any part of the body, it leaves full liberty for its movements and inflections, for the circulation of the blood and humours, and maintains the suppleness and strength of the muscles and fibres. The him/ The island of Cyprus is thus described by M. Sonnini: • Of all the ancient names of the Island of Cyprus, that which we love to recall to mind, although it forms a strange contrast with its present situation, is Macaria, the Fortunate Island. For this name it was indebted to the fertility, of its soil, the mildness of its climate, the inexpressible beauty of its plains, and the richness of its productions. The imagination of the poets lent new charms to this profusion of the gifts of Nature; they made it the cradle of the mother of the Loves; they consecrated this agreeable idea, by the name of Cytherea, and embellished it with all the charms of the most delightful descriptions, with graceful scenes of tenderness and voluptuous enjoyment. Over this theatre, in former times consecrated to happiness, to the arts, and to pleasure, at this day reign barbarians, who have transformed it into an abode of destruction and slavery. Superb edifices, elegant temples, where the most beautiful, as well as the most amiable of divinities was adored on altars surrounded by the sweetest and most voluptuous birds, living emblems of love and fidelity, now cover and sadden, with their scatterred remains, places of which they constituted the ornament and glory; and the Turks consume even the very ruins, which they still mutilate, in order to employ the fragments for common and profane purposes. Here, where the Graces reigned, at this day commands an old mosalem or governor, who scares them. Under a destructive goverment, agriculture has ceased to enrich with her treasures beautiful plains; and the splendour of an island, formerly fortunate, has vanished. The riches which it contains in its bosom are more deeply buried by despotism than by the earth with which they are covered. All boring, all search after mines, is strictly prohibited; and copper, formerly so abundant in the island, that the ancients likewise distinguished it by the epithet of Erosa, Copper Island, remains useless in the bowels of the mountains that contain it, as well as zinc, tin, iron, and other minerals which rendered it famous. Should the Island of Cyprus one day pass from this state of oppression to a political situation more mild and more favourable to its commerce and industry, we shall then search after all these mineral riches, and the working of them will powerfully contribute to revive the ancient splendour of the country in which they are contained; and as changes, so desirable, are, perhaps, not very remote, or at least I love to indulge the hope, it will not be useless to enter here into a few details respecting the nature of these subterraneous treasures. Gold, the end and motive of almost all human actions, and which corruption, ever-increasing, will long render the object of the warmest wishes and ardent wants of the greater number, was, as I have said, found in mines in the Island of Cyprus; but they have been for ages abandoned, and tradition can scarcely assign the places where they were found. We must not take in a literal sense, nor above all, refer to our age, a passage of Dapper, who, in his description of the islands of the Archipelago, page 52, asserts that there is in the middle of the island, near the town of Nicosia, as well well as in the environs of Chrusocco, mines of gold, where workmen are almost continually employed. These indications, which Dapper published in 1703, are extracted from another description of the islands of the Archipelago, printed in 1610, the author of which, Thomas Porchachi, had taken them from the ancient writers. Not that, in fact, the gold mines were not in the environs of Chrusocco, a village near the gulf of that name, which occupies the place of Acamantis, an ancient town, one of the most considerable of the island; some were known too in the vicinity of Tamassus, where stands the modern Famagusta, and at the foot of Mount Olympus, in a district celebrated for its wines; but the traces of ancient works have there disappeared, and the veins of a precious metal wait, in order to be discovered and fol lowed anew, the return of a protecting government, which regards not as crimes the strenuous efforts of industry towards useful speculations, to which are attached public prosperity and the affluence of individuals. But searching, which would attain with still greater certainty these two objects, that are the constant aim of every government anxious to preserve the esteem of nations and its own existence, would be that which would tend to recover the copper mines, formerly so abundant and so renowned. It is particularly in the territory occupied by a famous city of autiquity, Amathus, the site of which is at present occupied by the ancient Limassol, that the researches ought to be directed; it is in this ditrict, where those metals abound*, that we should again discover that beautiful primitive copper, which Nature herself has purified, and elaborated in large masses, in order to deliver it quite prepared to human industry, and which no longer exists in the exhausted mines of the Old Continent. The copper of Cyprus was, in ancient times, the finest in the world, and its rich and primordial mines furnished the first blocks of that metal, which were brought into It was principally sought for the purpose of composing that famous Corinthian brass, a precious mixture of copper, gold, and silver, the proportions of which are unknown to us, and which was in great esteem among the Greeks. The species of natural vitriol, the blue or azure vitriol, which still retains the name of Cyprus vitriol, was found in abundance in the copper mines of which I have just spoken. The ancient Tamassus furnished a great quantity of it; but the best was drawn from the district of Chrusocco, the vitriol mines of which were still worked towards the end of the seventeenth century. The iron mines lie scattered, and in a quantity sufficiently large to supply the wants of the Cypriots and the trade of the neighbouring countries. In the rocks is also found a very fine rock-crystal, which is called the Baffa diamond, becaused it is procured from the environs of Baffa, a barbarous word, which has taken the place of that of Paphos. The mountains in the vicinity of Cape Cromachiti and of Cape Alexandretta likewise contain some. Gravidamque Amathunta metallis, has Ovid said in his Metamor "phoses.' • The The bowels of the high mountains contain other riches less im portant than metallic mines, because they are useful to luxury alone. These are emeralds, amethysts, peridots, opals, &c. The Scythian jasper was reputed the best among the ancients; next came the Cyprian, and lastly, the Egyptian. The river Pedicus, which takes its source in the mountains at no great distance from Nicosia, rolls down, with its limpid waters, fragments of very fine red jasper. Asbestos, or the incombustible flax of the ancients, is still as plentiful as it was formerly; the quarry which furnishes it is in the mountain of Acamantis, near Cape Chromachiti. Talc is common, especially near Larnica, where it is employed for white-washing houses; and there are numerous quarries of plaster. Those of marble afford it in abundance for building. But at present there are scarcely worked any of those, which yield none but a com mon white marble, of little consistence. Of all the treasures which the earth conceals, the Turk, who knows only how to desolate it, allows not the unfortunate islanders any trade but in yellow ochre, umber, and terre verte, substances common in Cyprus, and which are employed in coarse painting. To the mineral substances, the exportation of which is still permitted, we must add marine salt, which, under the domination of the princes of Europe, was the source of considerable revenues. The great lake, or salt-marsh, in which it is formed, near the hamlet of the Salterns, was, in former times, three leagues in circumference ; but the exportation of salt having successively diminished, the lake. has been partly drained and cultivated; so that the sea and rainwaters are scarcely any longer collected there but on a space of a league in circuit. The heat of a burning sun accelerates the evaporation of these waters, and leaves exposed a thick crust of salt, which is gathered in the month of September, that is, before the rainy season, and is then heaped up in pyramids. These heaps of salt, in the end, acquire consistence and harden in the air; they even resist the winter rains, and, in the spring, are loaded on board small vessels, which convey them to the neighbouring coasts. The government farms out these natural salterns for a year only; and, agreeably to the plan of discouragement which it has marked out for itself, it clogs with a thousand shackles the extraction and the sale. Accord-' ingly there exists no proportion between what the salterns produced formerly and what they yield at the present day: a few of the country barks suffice for the conveyance of the quantity which enters into the export-trade; whereas the Venetians annually formed of it the cargo of seventy large ships. If the choked-up canals, which form the communication between the lake and the sea, were re-established, the water would cover the same extent of ground that it oc cupied before, and the lake of the salters would again become one of the most important branches of the trade and revenues of the island. • What the bowels of the earth contain in riches, is not more than what its surface may yield. The presents of agriculture are not here less numerous nor less brilliant than the less valuable treasures of mineralogy; but both are equally a prey to the brutal combinations of ignorance and barbarism. The produce of a languishing culture 14 affords affords the remembrance and the measure of the fertility of which a soil favoured by nature is susceptible, when the heavy and burning hand of tyranny does not succeed in drying it up. Olive-trees are much less common here than in past times. Their fruits no longer furnish sufficient oil for the supply of the inhabitants, and what remains of them seems to exist only to attest that olive-oil formed in Cyprus a very considerable branch of commerce. Immense reservoirs, in the form of cisterns, and coated with an impenetrable cement, still subsist in the environs of Larnica. Oil was preserved in these, and, to fill them, a prodigious quantity was required. The soil is so favourable to olive-trees, that some are seen here of such a size that two men, with outstretched arms, would find it difficult to span their circumference. These fine trees, which, in some places, are planted with order and symmetry, are a proof of the antiquity of a culture which cannot be too much encouraged in climates that are suitable to it, as well on account of the great consumption which domestic economy and the arts make of olive-oil, as of the losses which the severe winters of these latter years have occasioned in our plantations. Mulberry-trees still form small woods in certain quarters of the island; but their culture is abandoned in several, although it is the most easy of all, since it requires only to conduct water to the foot of each tree, in order to cool it during the burning heats of the summer. Here the bad custom obtains of lopping off the branches of these trees for the purpose of giving their leaves to the silk-worm, the rearing of which is attended with fewer inconveniencies than elsewhere, under a sky which, in the scason of gathering them, experiences no variations. The silk-trade, although less flourishing than it was before the invasion of the Turks, is, nevertheless, still of some importance. It is at Famugusta that the market of this commodity is held, and there, are annually sold about twenty thousand bales, of three hundred pounds each. In this quantity is white silk, gold yellow, sulphur yellow, and lastly orange coloured. The floss is likewise thrown into trade, and, like the silk itself, it is dispatched to the ports of Turkey and Europe. A tree less valuable, but which notwithstanding is of good produce, covers with its shade several districts, and bears fruits which furnish a particular trade: this is the carob or St. John's bread tree, common also in other countries whose temperature is mild, such as Spain, the south of France, Italy, and particularly the kingdom of Naples. In the ports of Cyprus, vessels load the long, thick pods which this tree produces, and carry them to Syria and Alexandria. In the latter port, I have seen several vessels arrive, whose cargo consisted solely of this species of fruit; whence an idea may be formed of the quantity consumed of it by the inhabitants of Egypt. They eat the succulent pulp which the pods contain, with hard and flat seeds; with them, it likewise supplies the place of sugar and honey, and they employ it in preserving other fruits. This pulp has the taste of that of cassia, and the honied, but insipid and slightly nauseous flavour of manna. The environs of Limassol are planted with a great quantity of carob-trees, and it is more particularly |