The city thus founded has had a long, a glorious, and an eventful history. Marseilles is to-day the capital of the Mediterranean, the true commercial metropolis of that inland sea which now once more has become a single organic whole, after its long division by the Mohammedan conquest of North Africa and the Levant into two distinct and hostile portions. Naples, it is true, has a larger population; but then, a population of Neapolitan lazzaroni, mere human drones lounging about their hive and basking in the sunlight, does not count for much, except for the macaroni trade. What Venice once was, that Marseilles is to-day; the chief gate of Mediterranean traffic, the main mart of merchants who go down in ships on the inland sea. In the Cannebière and the Old Port, she possesses, indeed, as Edmond About once graphically phrased it, "an open door upon the Mediterranean and the whole world." The steamers and sailing vessels that line her quays bind together the entire Mediterranean coast into a single organic commercial whole. Here is the packet for Barcelona and Malaga; there, the one for Naples, Malta, and Constantinople. By this huge liner, sunning herself at La Joliette, we can go to Athens and Alexandria; by that, to Algiers, Cagliari, and Tunis. Nay, the Suez Canal has extended her bounds beyond the inland sea to the Indian Ocean; and the Pillars of Hercules no longer restrain her from free use of the great Atlantic water-way. You may take ship, if you will, from the Quai de la Fraternité for Bombay or Yokohama, for Rio or Buenos Ayres, for Santa Cruz, Teneriffe, Singapore, or Melbourne. And this wide extension of her commercial importance Marseilles owes, mainly no doubt, to her exceptional advantages of natural position, but largely also, I venture to think, to the Hellenic enterprise of her acute and vigorous Græco-Gaulish population.