The Phœnicians, in the structure of the old world, may be compared to the lime cementing the blocks, or to the veins and arteries spreading life through the body. Phœnicia was the smallest of states: arms had no part in her growth, conquest no share in her greatness. She gathered and spread around the produce of the earth and of the toil of man; its business was on homely and vulgar things. More than the mystery which shrouds the antiquity of the most visionary, is spread over the origin of this most practical of people; our profoundest writers are at variance as to whether she gave to, or borrowed from, Greece her gods; as to the form of government which prevailed in her cities; as to the taxes imposed on her merchandise. The avowed introducers of letters into the Western world alone remain without the record of a written page, or of a chiselled stone. We see in this society dominion without conquest; greatness without ambition; permanency without numbers; freedom without turbulence; commerce without legislation;[123] and riches without pauperism. Neither arrogant in their strength, nor servile in their weakness, they could abstain from encroachments on the Lybian or Iberian populations, who afforded them a settlement, and maintain their peculiar character in Memphis, Babylon, and Persepolis. Their commerce paid to, while it received tribute from, every shore it visited; and was enriched in the aggregate wealth of all the wealth it bestowed. Thus did it take tithe of the spices of Malabar and the Philippines; of the frankincense of Abyssinia and Arabia; of the fine linen of Egypt; of the herds and camels of Deden; of the corn and oil of Judæa; of the ivory and ebony of Lybia and Hindoostan; of the gold of Spain; of the tin of the Cassiterides; of the amber of the Baltic. It had its colonies and its stores at Taprobane, as it had them at Cadiz and in Britain. [Illustration] A few days after my visit to Carteia, I was looking over some coins which a gentleman at Gibraltar had collected, and was astounded to come upon one which is not copied, but which is represented in the accompanying wood-cut.[124] This told the whole story of the glass-houses and the tin. I wonder if the coin was censured as indiscreet at Tyre. How is it that by putting the hand in this fashion to the nose the fancy should be tickled? Whence did the custom come? how did it travel to Britain? One is not prepared to have to search for such a gesture in the Hebrew Talmudists, or the Greek scholiasts; but here it is raised to numismatic dignity, and is worthy of the philosopher.