port of Argos, became the Venetian stronghold of _Napoli di Romania_. Peloponnêsos, no longer _Sclavinia_ was still Romania; on no man’s lips in those days was it Hellas. Nowhere, least of all in such a seat of its power as this, can the badge of the great republic be seen without interest, wonder, and admiration. Another lion not far off, commemorating the coming of a Bavarian king, it is only kindness to pass by. We are on the road--for a road there is--to the most wondrous relic of the præ-historic ages of the land. We soon stop before an elevation in the plain which suggests our own Old Sarum, which, at a second glance, may suggest Worlebury. We have at last reached one of the objects which alone would repay us for coming from Old Sarum or from Worlebury to see them. Salamis, Aigina, Pôros, Hydra itself, all seem but mere stages on the way as we stand below the vast and desolate walls of Tiryns. Tiryns. We have slightly sketched the main objects which flit before the eye in the delightful voyage from the harbour of Athens to what we may in some sort look on as the harbour of Argos. Once on the Argolic soil, close in the very centre and cradle of Hellenic legend, among the cities whose names have from childhood been surrounded with a halo of mythic lore, we must pause and muse at greater length on each of the famous and wondrous objects before us. Each has its own charm, its own lesson. Mykênê is the special goal of our pilgrimage, the object which--even putting modern discoveries apart--would of itself fully reward a journey from the Western world. But half the charm, half the lesson, of Mykênê comes from its relation to the other cities in the neighbourhood. Argos and Mykênê, the destroyer and the destroyed, suggest one another, and are coupled together, confounded together, in many a verse and many a legend. But they do not stand alone. Before we reach them we come to another spot, less famous, less striking in many points, but still having its own fame, its own charm, a spot which must not be passed by even by those who are hastening on to the most famous spot of all. The first of our hill-fortresses plays, beside its fellows, a comparatively small part either in legend or in history. Fixed on a less striking spot than either, not crowning such a height as the Larissa of Argos, not backed by mountain and gorge like the akropolis of Mykênê, desolate as Mykênê itself, but containing no such wonders of primitive art within its walled circuit, Tiryns stands before us, claiming our study simply by its walled circuit and nothing else. It is the hill-fort, and nothing but the hill-fort. But it is something to gaze on a hill-fort whose walls were ancient and wonderful in Homer’s day, and which abide much as they must have stood in Homer’s day. Argos, Mykênê, Corinth, are all to be seen and studied; but we shall lose no small part of the teaching of those cities and of