The Alban Mount. What is the common point of connexion between all the lands and places which bear the name of Alba, Albania, or something like it? They lie so far apart, they are inhabited by people of such utterly different nations and languages, that it is strange if there be any point of connexion among them, while it is at least as strange if the name has settled down on so many remote spots by sheer accident only. We must not forget that our own land has an interest in the question: we dwell in the Isle of Albion, and its northern part is specially Albanach or Albany. An English lady living on the eastern shore of the Hadriatic was lately complimented by a Scotch lady because, being an Albanian, she spoke such good English. It was afterwards suggested to her that she might have answered with a _tu quoque_ or something more; the Englishwoman was no Albanian; the Scotchwoman in a certain sense was. But have Albanians of either of these kinds anything to do either with the Duke of Al_v_a--for in his tongue "non aliud est _v_i_v_ere quam _b_i_b_ere"--or with the Albania beyond the Euxine? Then again it is singular to read, say in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, the local wars of Rome and Alba Longa described under exactly the same gentile names as those by which Imperial Anna describes strife between the New Rome and those Ghegs and Tosks who have again begun to make themselves famous. It is Ῥωμαῖοι and Ἀλβανοί in both cases, without the change of jot or tittle. In this case, at least, we believe that philologers would deny the slightest kindred between the names; but the casual identity is thereby only made the more startling. A malicious critic might say that Anna's Romans were as unlike old Romans as her Albanians could be unlike the men of Alba Longa. But her Romans did at least claim to be Romans, sharers in the inheritance of the wolf and the eagle; while her Albanians certainly laid no claims to any rights in the Alban sow and her thirty pigs.