The next was the sixth day we had passed on board the Bella Genovese. Going on deck at sunrise, I found the felucca contending with a head wind, but luckily in smooth water. On our right lay high dark mountains thrown into picturesque forms, with a shore lined with hamlets and towns. This was Ischia. Ahead was another island, of the same character, resembling a gigantic seawall thrown before the bay. This was Capri.--On our left, lay a small, low, level island, teeming with life; and to the north and east of us, opened the glorious Bay of Naples with thousands of objects of interest, that, by their recollections embrace nearly all of known time. The wind blew directly in our teeth, and we beat up the whole distance, making short stretches close in with the western, or rather northern side of the bay. The multitude of things of interest we saw and passed, rendered the time short, though it took us three hours. As the day opened, and we advanced farther into this glorious bay, we could not help exclaiming, “What dunce first thought of instituting a comparison between the bay of New York and this?” It is scarcely possible for two things composed of the same elements to be less alike, in the first place; nor are their excellencies the same in a single essential point. The harbour of New York is barely pretty; there being, within my own knowledge, some fifty ports that equal, or surpass it, even, in beauty. These may not be in England, a country in which we seek every standard of excellence; but the Mediterranean alone is full of them. No one would think of applying the term pretty, or even handsome, to the Bay of Naples; it has glorious and sublime scenery, embellished by a bewitching softness. Neither the water nor the land is the same. In New York the water is turbid and of a dullish green colour, for in its purer moments, it is, at the best, of the greenish hue of the entire American coast; while that of the Bay of Naples has the cerulean tint and limpidity of the ocean. At New York, the land, low and tame, in its best months offers nothing but the verdure and foliage of spring and summer, while the coast of this gulf, or bay, are thrown into the peaks and faces of grand mountains, with the purple and rose-coloured tints of a pure atmosphere and a low latitude. If New York does possess a sort of background of rocks, in the Palisadoes, which vary in height from three to five hundred feet, Naples has a natural wall, in the rear of the Campania Felice, among the Apennines, of almost as many thousands. This is speaking only of nature. As regards artificial accessories, to say nothing of recollections, the shores of this bay are teeming with them of every kind; not Grecian monstrosities, and Gothic absurdities in wood, but palaces, villas, gardens, towers, castles, cities, villages, churches, convents and hamlets, crowded in a way to leave no point fit for the eye unoccupied, no picturesque site unimproved. On the subject of the scale on which