In the midst of these surrounding islets, not twenty miles distant from the Asiatic coast, lay Rhodes—a fairy island on a fairy ocean; and the soft southern breeze, as it swept over her fields, carried far over the waters the scent of those roses which bloomed through all the year, and from which she derived her name. The very rocks were garlanded with them; beds of flowering myrrh perfumed the air; and tufts of laurel-roses adorned the margins of the rivulets with their gaudy blossoms. It is scarcely strange that Rhodes should in old times have been the school of art; for men caught, as it were naturally, the painter’s inspiration amidst scenes of such enchanting loveliness. She was made, indeed, to be a home of peace; her skies were ever cloudless and untroubled; her woods stood thick with fruit-trees, and the velvet of her sloping lawns sparkled with a thousand flowers. Her beauty was neither stern nor grand,—it was entirely pastoral; and if you wandered inland round her entire circuit, which was scarcely thirty miles, one verdant landscape every where met your eye, woods and gardens breaking the sameness of those lovely pastures; while all round, between the hills and through the foliage of the trees, you caught the blue line of the sea, whose music, as it murmured on the shore, was never absent from your ears. In old times, as we have said, Rhodes had had her celebrity; she had taught eloquence to Rome, and had claimed the empire of the seas; but all her greatness had vanished under Greek misrule and the barbarism of her Saracen masters; and when the knights took possession of their new territory, they found nothing left of ancient Rhodes but her beauty and her name. There were, however, great resources, and these, under their hands, were not long in developing. The forests furnished wood, and the island of Syma skilful carpenters for ship-building; and these latter had the art of constructing galleys so light and swift that no vessel on the eastern seas could match them with either sail or oar. So on the summit of a high mountain in Syma a watch-tower was built, and the inhabitants bound themselves to keep a look-out over the ocean, and send the first news to Rhodes by their swiftest galley of the approach of hostile fleets; and by their skill the navy of the order rapidly increased in magnitude and excellence. Then there was Lero, with her quarries of rich marble, which supplied a commerce of herself; and Nisara, whose ships were known in every city on the southern coasts, and whose inhabitants had retained something of their old fame as artists, and encouraged by a free and generous government, soon filled their towns with palaces that vied with those of Genoa;—with rich columns, and statues, and marble fountains, all brought together in a lavish profusion, and bespeaking the noble tastes of her merchant lords. There were plenty of ports and harbours on these island coasts, and a population of maritime