great and beautiful city. Many of her stately edifices were preserved; her temples, towering in their pristine majesty, beckoned the anxious mariner to her prosperous shores; her harbors with their colonnades were still intact, and it was with no ordinary emotions that the Moslem looked upon these evidences of the taste and civilization of one of the most opulent and renowned capitals of antiquity. The Phœnicians, by their proximity to and regular intercourse with the highly cultivated races of Assyria and Egypt, had added immeasurably to their stock of learning, and eagerly disseminated among their colonies the notions of politics, philosophy, and science, which they had imbibed in their periodical voyages to the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile. And as from Asia Minor, plainly disclosed in the myth of Cadmus, first emanated that knowledge of letters and the arts, which, expanding with a prodigious development, culminated in the matchless creations of the Grecian sculptor and the Grecian muse; so to the northern coast of Africa can be traced the dawn of that inspiration of refinement and taste which awakened in the minds of the rude and warlike nomads of the Desert a desire for something better than the subjugation of barbarian tribes, something more enduring than the costly pageants of military glory. Settled almost thirteen centuries before the Christian era, and inheriting from the parent city of Tyre that spirit of enterprise which had gained for the latter the carrying trade of the world, at the time of the foundation of Rome, Carthage was already the wealthiest and most polished state on the shores of the Mediterranean. Her inhabitants, rather inclined to peaceful occupations and the luxurious ease that prosperity confers than to the privations of the camp and the dangers of the field, usually enlisted mercenaries to prosecute their conquests. When at the height of her power, her armies, which had penetrated the mysterious depths of the Libyan and Ethiopian deserts, and whose prowess had been displayed alike in the defiles of Sicily and upon the plains of the Bætis, had subjected to her authority a wide extent of territory, and more than three hundred towns in Africa alone, many of them places of considerable magnitude. In the Spanish Peninsula, whence she drew her supplies of the precious metals, she employed in the silver mines fifty thousand men. The most assiduous care was paid to agriculture, and the extraordinary fertility of the soil, yielding with ease one hundred and fifty fold, was assisted by an equable climate and a scientific and extensive system of irrigation. The substantial character of the public works of the capital is evinced by the ruins of the cisterns and the aqueduct, which have defied the storms and revolutions of two thousand years. But it was chiefly in commercial affairs that the Carthaginians asserted their immeasurable superiority over all their contemporaries. Their merchants, whose