both these qualities in our fair African friends, put to very severe trials without suffering any apparent diminution. Their greatest failings seem to be vanity and jealousy; and these are surely too natural and too inconsiderable to merit any serious reprehension, more especially in a barbarous nation. Curiosity is at the same time, with them, as it is said to be with the sex in general, a quality in very extensive circulation; and if we could have stopped to answer all the various odd questions which the good ladies of Cyrene proposed to us, we should have employed the whole day in replying to them. By the help of a few little trinkets, however, which we usually carried about with us, we contrived to put an end to the conversation, without any offence, whenever it began to exceed moderate limits; and continued our route under a shower of pious wishes that the blessing of God might attend us. In passing along the galleries we have mentioned in this ravine, there are a great many excavated tombs, some of which are very beautifully finished, and one of them presents the only example which we remember to have met with at Cyrene of a mixture of two orders of architecture in the same part of a building—the portico in front of this tomb being supported by Ionic columns, surmounted with a Doric entablature. The whole portico is formed out of the rock itself, which has been left in the manner formerly alluded to, and advances a few feet before the wall of the chamber in which the door is excavated. The proportions are bad, and no part of the tomb has anything particular to recommend it to notice beyond the peculiarity we have stated it to possess; but as it is the only instance which we observed of the kind, we have thought it as well to advert to it. The tympanum is here placed immediately over the zophorus, without any cornice intervening, and the mutules are in consequence omitted[13]. Like many other excavated tombs at Cyrene, the one now in question has no cellæ beyond the chamber; and the places for the bodies were sunk in the floor itself and covered with tablets of stone. In such cases we often see that two, or more, bodies have been ranged parallel with each other round the sides of the chamber, in the manner represented in the ground-plans (page 464), a circumstance which never occurs in the cellæ, as we have already stated above.