close neighbourhood which is so characteristic of Greek geography--a neighbourhood as near as that of Euboia to Boiôtia at one point and to Northern Achaia at another--two races as unlike one another as any could be who worshipped the same ancestral gods and spoke dialects of the same ancestral tongue. The development and the rivalry of those two powers give us our second lesson in Grecian history, the lesson of the days when, if the scale of men is smaller, the scale of things is larger, when cities have grown into federations, when the range of Grecian politics is no longer shut up within the Grecian seas, but when Macedonia and Pergamos, Syria and Egypt, Carthage and Rome herself, have begun to appear as actors on the scene. The seas of Eastern Greece belong to the days of her more brilliant yet narrower fame, when Greece was her own world, when the teachings of her history are mainly teachings of example and analogy. The seas of Central and Western Greece belong to the days when Greece, less free it may be, less brilliant, less rich in great deeds and mighty men, had become part of a greater world, and when her destinies had become connected with the destinies of later days by a direct chain of cause and effect. The historical position of the Corinthian gulf is that it is, above all the waters of Hellas, the sea which washes the shores of the Federal lands. As we get clear of the gulf, by the mouth of Achelôos, the White River of later nomenclature, we are again among the Western islands, though we now see them from wholly different points, and in wholly different relations to one another from those in which we saw them as we first made our way from Corfu round Peloponnêsos. Our course is somewhat erratic; but it enables us to see a coast which has a character of its own and a history of its own. We skirt the shore of Akarnania. Here is a land which has no place in the Homeric Catalogue--a land therefore which has no place in the Hellas of those days, so far as we have any right in these days to make use of the name of Hellas at all. It was then the _Epeiros_, the nameless mainland, the non-Hellenic shore, as opposed to the Hellenic islands, the realms of Megês and of Odysseus. In the Federal age we find it a Federal commonwealth, weak besides its robber neighbours of Aitôlia, but holding the first place in Greece for what Livy calls the “fides insita genti,” the people who never broke their faith to either friend or enemy. Yet they had enough of worldly wisdom to plead their absence from the Catalogue as a merit in Roman eyes. Aitôlians, Achaians, all the rest, had a share in the overthrow of the mother city of Rome; Akarnania was guiltless. Here is a special history, and the coast has a special character. It is, like other Grecian coasts, a coast of bays and islands and peninsulas; but nowhere else have we seen such a crowd of small islands, mere spots of rock some of them, among which we thread our way, reminding us less