"The name of Sicily is illustrious in history. If the reputation of a people had for sole foundation and measure the number of inhabitants, the extent of its territory, the duration of its influence, the Sicilians, impoverished by continual revolutions, decimated by sucessive tyrannies, more isolated from the general progress by their internal organisation, than from the mainland by their geographical position, would hold, perhaps, in the annals of the world, no more room than their island occupies on the map of Europe. But they need not fear oblivion: they have known glory,--and what glory touches, though but transitorily, for ever retains the mark. For individuals as for nations, it suffices that their lot be cast in those rare and splendid epochs whose contact ennobles every thing, which illuminate all things by their brilliancy, and stamp themselves indelibly upon the memory of the remotest generations. Happy who then lives, for he shall never die! Vast kingdoms, boundless regions, peopled by numerous races, powerful by material force, but intellectually vulgar, then yield in dignity and grandeur to the least nook of land, to some petty peninsula or remote island. Such was Greece, such also was Sicily, her rival, her competitor, and the asylum of her illustrious exiles. "In the middle ages there was no vestige of the ancient Trinacria--of that land of art and learning, the home of every branch of human knowledge--of that politic and warlike power which yielded to Rome and Carthage only when she had made them dearly pay a long-disputed victory--of that Sicily, in short, which Plato taught and Timoleon governed--which Archimedes defended and Theocritus sang. Formerly the whole island was covered with cities. In the thirteenth century, most of these had disappeared. Agrigentum could boast but the ruins of its colossus and temples. Syracuse still retained some shadow of past greatness: she was not yet reduced, as now, to the quarries whence she sprung; she had not yet become less than a ruin; but her splendour was extinct. Catania, overthrown by earthquakes, found it difficult again to rise. Nevertheless other Sicilian towns preserved their importance, and Christendom could not boast cities handsomer and more populous--more abounding in wealth and embellished by monuments--than commercial Messina and kingly Palermo."