In the Museum of Palermo, to which city the explorer of these ruined sanctuaries of art and religion may now be supposed to have returned, the interesting metopes of Selinus will recall the recollection of that greater museum of ruins which he just visited at Selinunto; but the suppressed monastery, which has been now turned into a Museo Nazionale, has not much else besides its Hellenic architectural fragments to detain him. And it may be presumed, perhaps, that the pursuit of antiquities, which may be hunted with so much greater success in other parts of the islands, is not precisely the object which leads most visitors to Sicily to prolong their stay in this beautifully seated city. Its attraction lies, in effect and almost wholly, in the characteristic noted in the phrase just used. Architecturally speaking, Palermo is naught: it is branded, as has been already said, with the banality and want of distinction of all modern Italian cities of the second class. And, moreover, all that man has ever done for her external adornment she can show you in a few hours; but days and weeks would not more than suffice for the full appreciation of all she owes to nature. Antiquities she has none, or next to none, unless, indeed, we are prepared to include relics of the comparatively modern Norman domination, which of course abound in her beautiful mosaics, in that category. The silt of successive ages, and the detritus of a life which from the earliest times has been a busy one, have irrecoverably buried almost all vestiges of her classic past. Her true, her only, but her all-sufficient attraction is conveyed in her ancient name. She is indeed "Panormus"; it is as the "all harbor city" that she fills the eye and mind and lingers in the memory and lives anew in the imagination. When the city itself and its environs as far as Monreale and San Martino and La Zisa have been thoroughly explored; when the imposing Porta Felice has been duly admired; when the beautiful gardens of La Flora, with its wealth of sub-tropical vegetation, has been sufficiently promenaded on; when La Cala, a quaint little narrow, shallow harbor, and the busy life on its quays have been adequately studied; then he who loves nature better than the works of man, and prefers the true eternal to the merely figurative "immortal," will confess to himself that Palermo has nothing fairer, nothing more captivating, to show than that _chef-d' oeuvre_ which the Supreme Artificer executed in shaping those noble lines of rock in which Pellegrino descends to the city at its foot, and in tracing that curve of coast-line upon which the city has sprung up under the mountain's shadow. The view of this guardian and patron height, this tutelary rock, as one might almost fancy it, of the Sicilian capital is from all points and at all hours beautiful. It dominates the city and the sea alike from whatever point one contemplates it, and the bold yet