I have long felt very desirous to visit a country, which, notwithstanding the many revolutions it has undergone, and the enlightened characters of its conquerors, is regarded as still immersed in a degree of barbarism almost unparalleled. It appeared to me next to impossible that a nation so contiguous to Europe, with which it has for centuries maintained a constant intercourse, could have remained in a state of such profound ignorance. Impressed with these ideas, I readily embraced the offer of a friend to accompany him from Gibraltar to this place, intending to travel further up the country, should I meet with sufficient inducement from the result of my observations here. We landed on the first of this month, and the intermediate time I have employed in obtaining information relative to the town of Tangiers from the earliest tradition to the present time. As the particulars I have collected do not appear devoid of Interest, I flatter myself, you will be gratified that I should have made them the subject of a letter. This town, which by the ancients was called _Tingis_, or Tingir, and appears to have been the metropolis of the _Western Mauritania_, or Tingitania, as it was named, to distinguish it from _Mauritania Cæsariensis_; according to Pliny and others, was first founded ed fay _Antæus_ (about a thousand years before Christ), the same who was afterwards conquered and slain by _Hercules_. The giant is supposed to have been buried here: and the report of Plutarch, that his tomb was opened by Sertorius, and a corpse sixty cubits or more in length, taken out of it, confirms the idea. But according to others, _Tingis_, or the present _Tangiers_, lays claim to a more ancient founder than _Antæus_. Procopius mentions, that in his time were standing two pillars of white stone, upon which were inscribed in the Phoenician characters the following words: _"We are the Canaanites who fed from Joshua, the son of Nun."_ A colony of Carthaginians settled here, and it is most probable that a flourishing trade was carried on by them, as the situation of Tangiers is extremely well adapted for that purpose. Indeed the name _Tingis_, in the language of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, signifies an _emporium_. When the Mauritaniæ became subject to the Romans, in the reign of Julius Cæsar, Bocchus, the son-in-law of Jugurtha, having defeated Bogud, the king of _Mauritania Tingitania_, he became possessed of that country, and Augustus, or, as some say, Octavius, confirmed this acquisition to him; and the inhabitants of _Tingis_ were allowed the privileges of Roman citizens.