It is hardly then as a fortress, but rather as a great entrepôt of traffic, that Gibraltar first presents itself to the newly-landed visitor. He is now too close beneath its frowning batteries and dominating walls of rock to feel their strength and menace so impressive as at a distance; and the flowing tide of many-colored life around him overpowers the senses and the imagination alike. He has to seek the outskirts of the town on either side in order to get the great Rock again, either physically or morally, into proper focus. And even before he sets out to try its height and steepness by the ancient, if unscientific, process of climbing it--nay, before he even proceeds to explore under proper guidance its mighty elements of military strength--he will discover perhaps that sternness is not its only feature. Let him stroll round in the direction of the race-course to the north of the Rock, and across the parade-ground, which lies between the town and the larger area on which the reviews and field-day evolutions take place, and he will not complain of Gibraltar as wanting in the picturesque. The bold cliff, beneath which stands a Spanish café, descends in broken and irregular, but striking, lines to the plain, and it is fringed luxuriantly from stair to stair with the vegetation of the South. Marching and counter-marching under the shadow of this lofty wall, the soldiers show from a little distance like the tin toys of the nursery, and one knows not whether to think most of the physical insignificance of man beside the brute bulk of Nature, or of the moral--or immoral--power which has enabled him to press into his service even the vast Rock which stands there beetling and lowering over him, and to turn the blind giant into a sort of Titanic man-at-arms.