Among the display of the Greek church are banners, borne on festival days, representing favourite saints, to whose representation they attribute extraordinary qualities. A remarkable superstition of this kind prevails at Magnesia: St. George, the patron of England, is in high esteem there, and at Easter his banner forms the most distinguished object in the procession. It has the important property of distinguishing and punishing a sinner; it is borne to church always by a priest, who of course passes the ordeal uninjured and with credit; but on returning, it is given to some unfortunate layman, who bears to the grave the marks of the chastisements inflicted on him for his sins. He is violently beaten by some persons appointed for the purpose, while the blows are faithfully believed to proceed from the image of our pugnacious saint. [Illustration: T. Allom. S. Fisher. THE RUINS OF HIERAPOLIS, FROM THE THEATRE. ASIA MINOR.] Nothing marks so strongly the genius and propensities of the ancient Greeks, as their theatres. As these edifices were the most interesting and most attractive, so they seemed to have engaged their greatest attention, and to have called forth all their skill, to render them the most permanent and beautiful of the buildings they erected. We have already remarked, that every town, inhabited by Greeks, or the descendants of Greeks, seems to have had one, as essential to its well-being; and they were not erected with the fragile and perishable materials with which the modern edifices of the same kind were constructed. Their seats were not wooden benches enclosed with slight walls and covered with slender roofs, or their decorations flimsy painted paper and canvass; they were built with solid blocks of marble, roofed with the canopy of heaven, adorned with statuary and sculptured ornaments of imperishable materials; and their remains, at the present day, are as durable as the rock on which they were generally erected. When every other vestige of an ancient city is obliterated, its theatre is the only building that remains, to determine its site; and when ruins had concealed it, or the lapse of time had covered it with soil, accident or design has detected it under the mass, as perfect in some of its parts as when it was frequented by a crowded audience. The beautiful theatre in the small and comparatively obscure Island of Milo had disappeared for ages, till unexpectedly discovered by agricultural labourers, in a solitary spot, where no other evidence existed but itself, of the city to which it had belonged. Its materials were solid blocks of beautifully sculptured marble; the angular mouldings seemed as sharp, and the workmanship as recent, as when the chisel had first struck them; and though probably not less than 2,000 years erected, looked as fresh, said a traveller, “as if the masons had just gone home to their dinner, and you expected them to return every moment, and put the last hand to their work.”