THE ACROPOLIS,

ATHENS.

Drawn by J. M. W. Turner, R.A. from a Sketch by T. Allison.

"Ancient of days! August Athena! where

Where are thy men of might?- thy great of soul?
Gone-glimmering through the dream of things that were;
First in the race that led to glory's goal,

They won, and pass'd away—is this the whole?

A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour!

The warrior's weapon and the sophist's stole

Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, grey flits the shade of power." Childe Harold, canto ii. st. 2.

“AT Athens, on his first visit, Lord Byron made a stay of between two and three months, not a day of which he let pass without employing some of its hours in visiting the grand monuments of ancient genius around him, and calling up the spirit of other times among their ruins.

Though the poet has left in his own works an ever-enduring testimony of the enthusiasm with which he now contemplated the scenes around him, it is not difficult to conceive that, to superficial observers, Lord Byron at Athens might have appeared an untouched

spectator of much that throws ordinary travellers into at least verbal raptures. With the antiquary and connoisseur his sympathies were few and feeble: for antiquities, indeed, unassociated with high names and deeds, he had no value whatever; and of works of art he was content to admire the general effect, without professing, or aiming at any knowledge of the details. It was to Nature, in her lovely scenes of grandeur and beauty,—or, as at Athens, shining, unchanged among the ruins of glory and of art,—that the true fervid homage of his whole soul was paid."- Moore's Life of Byron.

"The Acropolis of Athens," says Dodwell," is its citadel; a vast rock, lofty, abrupt, and nearly surrounded by precipices, which make it inaccessible except on that side which is towards the Piraeus, or port of Athens. On the area of its summit anciently stood the city, founded by Cecrops, whence the present city, the plain, and the gulf, presented a magnificent panorama. The Acropolis is now crowded with the ruins of the ancient monuments of Athenian glory that formerly exhibited all the magnificence which riches and art could realise, a splendour of effect which these contended for the superiority of accomplishing; or, as Chandler has expressed it,' It appeared as one entire offering to the deity, surpassing in excellence, and astonishing in richness."

In the days of its glory, volumes were filled with the

THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS.

descriptions of its temples, and the pictures, the statues, and the riches they contained. Nero plundered the Acropolis of statues, yet not fewer than three thousand remained there in the days of Pliny.

It was the glory of Pericles, in the best days of Athens, to direct its resources to the embellishment of the city; and when his enemies reproached him with profuseness and extravagance in the employment of its revenues, he asserted that "It was wisdom to convert the prosperity of a state, sufficiently prepared for war, into its perpetual ornament by public works, which excited every liberal art, moved every hand, and dispersed plenty to the labourer and the artificer, to the mariner and the merchant-the whole city being at once employed, maintained, and beautified.”

"The western end of the Acropolis, which furnished the only access to the summit of the hill, was 168 feet in breadth, an opening so narrow that it appeared practicable to the artists of Pericles to fill up the space with a single building, which, in serving the main purpose of a gateway, should contribute at once to fortify and to adorn the citadel. "This work," says Colonel Leake, "the greatest production of civil architecture in Athens, which equalled the Parthenon in felicity of execution, and surpassed it in boldness and originality of design, was begun in the archonship of Euthymenes, in the year B.C. 437." This was the Propylæa.