The form of the country, as you ascend from Lechæum to Corinth, is very marked and peculiar. At some distance from the flat shore the road leads up through a steep pass of little height, which is cut through a long ridge of rock, almost like a wall, and over which lies a higher plateau of land. The same feature is again repeated a mile inland, as the traveller approaches the site of ancient Corinth. These plateaus, though not lofty, are well marked, and perfectly distinct, the passes from one up to the next being quite sufficient to form a strong place of defence against an attacking force. How far these rocky parapets reach I did not examine. Behind the highest plateau rises the great cliff on which the citadel was built. But even from the site of the old city it is easy to obtain a commanding view of the isthmus, of the two seas, and of the Achæan coast up to Sikyon. The traveller who expects to find any sufficient traces of the city of Periander and of Timoleon, and, I may say, of St. Paul, will be grievously disappointed. In the middle of the wretched straggling modern village there stand up seven enormous rough stone pillars of the Doric Order, evidently of the oldest and heaviest type; and these are the only visible relic of the ancient city, looking altogether out of place, and almost as if they had come there by mistake. These pillars, though insufficient to admit of our reconstructing the temple, are in themselves profoundly interesting. Their shaft up to the capital is of one block, about twenty-one feet high and six feet in diameter. It is to be observed that over these gigantic monoliths the architrave, in which other Greek temples show the largest blocks, is not in one piece, but two, and made of beams laid together longitudinally.(149) The length of the shafts (up to the neck of the capital) measures about four times their diameter, on the photograph which I possess; I do not suppose that any other Doric pillar known to us is so stout and short. The material is said almost universally to be limestone, but if my eyes served me aright, it was a very porous and now rough sandstone, not the least like the bluish limestone in which the lions of the gate of Mycenæ are carved. The pillars are said to have been covered with stucco, and were of course painted. Perhaps even the figures of the pediment were modelled in clay, as we are told was the case in the oldest Corinthian temples, when first the fashion came in of thus ornamenting an otherwise flat and unsightly surface. The great temple of Pæstum—which is, probably, the next oldest, and certainly the finest extant specimen of the early Doric style—has no figures in the pediment, and seems never to have had them, unless, indeed, they were painted in fresco on the stucco, with which it was probably covered. Those who have seen the temple at Pæstum are, perhaps, the only visitors who will be able to frame to themselves an image of the very similar structure at Corinth,