At last, after a very hot and stony ride, with less color and less beauty than we had ever yet found in Greece, we descended into the great valley of Tripoli, formerly held by Tegea at the south, and Mantinea at the north. The modern town lies between the ancient sites, but nearer to Tegea, which is not an hour’s ride distant. The old Tripolis, of which the villages were absorbed by Megalopolis, is placed by the geographers in quite another part of Arcadia, near Gortyn, and due north of the western plain. The vicissitudes of the modern town are well known; its importance under the Turks, its terrible destruction by the Egyptians in the War of Liberation;(145) even now, though not a house is more than fifty years old, it is one of the largest and most important towns in the Morea. The whole place was in holiday, it being the Greek Easter Day, and hundreds of men in full costume crowded the large square in the middle of the town. There is a considerable manufacture of what are commonly called Turkey carpets, and of silk; but the carpets have of late years lost all the beauty and harmony of color for which they were so justly admired, and are now copied from the worst Bavarian work—tawdry and vulgar in the extreme. They are sold by weight, and are not dear, but they were so exceedingly ugly that we could not buy them. This decadence of taste is strange when compared with the woollen work of Arachova. If the colors of the Arachovite rugs were transferred to the carpets of Tripoli, nothing could be more effective, or more likely to attract English buyers. I could not learn that any passing travellers save some Germans, are now ever tempted to carry them home.