is identified by the Turkish name of Sest Tepe affixed to a tumulus on the shore; but the appellation of Gaziler Eschiesy, the strand of the conquerors, refers, undoubtedly, not to the Getic or Persian inroads, but to the landing of the Turks themselves, whose earliest European acquisition was the neighbouring fort of Coiridicastro, a memorable name, from the wretched pleasantries with which the mob of Constantinople consoled themselves for its loss. Our travellers received the usual civilities from the Pasha of the Dardanelles, (accompanied indeed with that hint in praise of English pistols, which is familiar to all who visit the Levant,) and enjoyed a delightful passage in an open boat down the Hellespont to Koum Kalè. The epithet (πλατυς Ελλησποντος) applied by Homer to this narrow frith, which has perplexed the greater part of his commentators and readers, is justified by Mr. Walpole in a short but valuable note, in which he proves from Hesychius and Aristotle de Meteoris, lib. iii. that πλατυς ought not to be rendered 'broad' but 'salt.' We readily join in the praise which Dr. Clarke bestows on this ingenious solution; but we are not, we confess, sufficiently expert in his mode of reasoning to comprehend how an epithet to which, in common with all other seas, the Hellespont is entitled, can convey any allusion to the remarkable difference of colour which he noticed between the clear brine of the Straits and the muddy embouchure of the Mender, on the left or western bank of which, on a spit of sand, occupied by the modern fort of Koum Kalè, Dr. Clarke first landed on the interesting plain of the Troad. The following observations on its general character appear to us both novel and well founded,

' A peculiar circumstance characterized the topography of the cities of ancient Greece; and this perhaps has not been considered so general as it really was. Every metropolis possessed its citadel and its plain; the citadel as a place of refuge during war; the plain as a source of agriculture in peace. To this were some exceptions; as in the instance of Delphi, whose celebrity originated in secondary causes; but they were very few, and may be omitted. In the provinces of Greece, at this day, the appearance caused by a plain, flat as the surface of the ocean, surrounded by mountains, or having lofty rocks in its centre or sides, serves to denote the situation of ruins proving to be those of some ancient capital. Many of those plains border on the sea, and seem to have been formed by the retiring of its waters. Cities so situated were the most ancient; Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, are of the number. The vicinity of fertile plains to the coast offered settlements to the earliest colonies, before the interior of the country became known. As population increased, or the first settlers were driven inward by new adventurers, cities more mediterranean were established; but all of these possessed their respective plains. The physical phenomena of Greece, differing from those of any other country, present a series of beautiful

beautiful plains, successively surrounded by mountains of limestone; resembling, although upon a larger scale, and rarely accompanied by volcanic products, the craters of the Phlegræan fields. Everywhere their level surfaces seem to have been deposited by water, gradually retired or evaporated; they consist, for the most part, of the richest soil, and their produce is yet proverbially abundant.

'In this manner stood the cities of Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Megara, Eleusis, Athens, Thebes, Amphissa, Orchomenus, Chæronea, Lebadea, Larissa, Pella, and many other. Pursuing the inquiry over all the countries bordering the Ægean, we find every spacious plain accompanied by the remains of some city, whose celebrity was proportioned to the fertility of its territory, or the advantages of its maritime position. Such, according to Homer, were the circumstances of association characterizing that district of Asia Minor, in which Troy was simated.'-p. 73.

It is not to be supposed, (Dr. Clarke very sensibly proceeds to observe,) that a plain so favoured by nature as that watered by the Mender and backed by the ridge of Casdagby, should afford a solitary instance in which these advantages had not attracted settlers; and the voice of antiquity is unanimous in assigning to this very region the city whose misfortunes afforded a theme to the most interesting poem in the world. The existence and the history of such a city, which the genius of Homer has expanded and adorned, would never, we think, have been the subject of doubt, had not such doubts arisen partly from the imperfection of our modern maps, which pervert even those stronger features of nature to which every poet is anxious to accommodate his fiction; and partly, we apprehend, from a mistake which is common both to the assailants and defenders of the veracity of Homer, who have on the one side judged a fiction grounded on fact, with the same severity which would have been applicable to a chronicle of the facts themselves, and on the other hand, have attempted to warp and bend the objects of nature into compliance with the details of a poetic Mythos. For although a real poet is naturally anxious to avail himself of interesting and well known scenery and a story already hallowed by tradition, yet it is only so far as they suit his purpose that either tradition or topography will be adhered to; and it is surely preposterous to expect that in a poem, so long, so varied, and so busy as that of Homer, he should exactly conform to the sober rules of the annalist, or the land-surveyor. If the place assigned for the Grecian camp be, as is asserted, one which before the time at which the action of the Iliad begins, must have destroyed them by disease,-instead of doubting, with Bryant, that the Greeks ever landed in the Troad at all, -it is surely safer to suppose that this is an instance in which, from some unknown and to us very immaterial cause,

the

the poet has departed from the truth of history. If, in the same manner, the probable site of ancient Ilium should be ill adapted to the progress of Achilles' chariot round its walls, if the fountains mentioned by Homer are a little farther from the city than his narrative implies, or if no such fountains be discoverable in that immediate neighbourhood, -the answer ought to be that Homer is a poet, not an historian, -that the insolence of Achilles and the tepid spring of the Scamander were characteristic and common features of the age and country which he paints, and that, in the words of Aristotle, a poet is not tied down to facts, but only to probabilities. It was the general opinion of antiquity, that Homer had in many respects departed from the truth of history in the action of his poem. Nor cau any reason be assigned why he should not, by an equal privilege, have omitted, or softened, or altered such features of the scenery as interfered in his opinion with the effect or coherence of his narration. His sparing mention of rivers, which his warriors must have forded twice a day, and which must have materially impeded the advance of the Trojan chariots from the mound of the plain to the Grecian intrenchment, is a proof that he did not think it necessary, like some of his admirers, to ascertain his distances with the chain or the theodolite, or to transfer to poetry the trembling accuracy of a witness on a boundary cause. But while a poet himself is seldom thus particular, it is the privilege of poetry to bestow even on imaginary scenery, the minuteness and liveliness which conveys the idea of accuracy, and if only the general features of his picture are correct, the zeal of his admirers in after-ages will not fail to assign a local habitation to even the wildest of his fictions. The sexton of Melrose has already begun to point out the tomb of Michael Scott, as described in the Lay of the Last Minstrel; and though the main outlines of Homer's picture are probably copied from nature, yet we doubt not that many of those objects to which Strabo refers, instead of affording subjects for the bard to describe, derived, in after-days, their name and designation from his description.

But though we do not apprehend that such topographical investigations will add in any material degree to the interest or clearness of the Iliad, yet we esteem the investigation of the Troad as important as any inquiry can be which is purely antiquarian, and feel anxious to do justice to Dr. Clarke's opinions and discoveries, which we shall present, if possible, to our readers in a less perplexing shape than that of his narration. For it must not be concealed, that partly from the minuteness of the watch-paper map to the scale of which he has compressed the greater part of Priam's monarchy; partly from his caprice in omitting the accustomed index which in other maps directs us to the cardinal points; and still more from the doubt and hesitation with which he differs from the opinions of former travellers, he has involved his facts in an obscurity which they do not deserve; nor are the insane wanderings of lo more difficult to unravel than our author's excursion from Koum Kale. With some trouble we have, we flatter ourselves, at length succeeded, and it may encourage others to employ some portion of the pains which we have done, when we express our impartial opimion that, whether we consider the number and importance of the mins discovered; the good sense and good fortune which have quided Dr. Clarke's inquiries; or the remarkable coincidence of their result with the descriptions of Strabo and Pliny; the present tour may seem to constitute an era in the topography of the Iliensian plain, and to have restored a clue for tracing its antiquities wich had been lost for above a thousand years. There are two points on the coast of the Troad which may be considered as data on which all its inquirers are agreed. The first of these is the Sigeian promontory, a natural feature too remarkable to be mistaken, and which is identified with Cape Yanizari. The second is the tomb of Ajax, ascertained by its distance, as given by Pliny, of thirty stadia to the eastward of the former; and as being the only conspicuous tumulus on the shore between Koum Kalè and the Dardanelles. Between these points, and extending from the latter to the embouchure of the Mender, is the beach which tradition or fancy has uniformly assigned for the port and encampment of the Greeks. The region, however, immediately in front of this station, and lying to the east of the Mender, had, down to the date of Dr. Clarke's excursion, been very imperfectly explored. Pococke, who traversed its coast from the Dardanelles to Koum Kalè, and had therefore the best opportunity of identifying the points mentioned by Strabo, though he notices the probable situation of Ophrurium and the Ptelean pool, hurries with apparent indifference over the tract just mentioned; and Chandler, though in an excursion from Sigeium he advanced in the very direction of Palaio Callifat, and noticed a conical hill at the foot of Ida, which he conceived to be the Callicolone, stopped short, as by fatality, at the very moment of discovery, and abandoned the unfinished adventure to a more fortunate, or more persevering inquirer. In the days, indeed, of Chandler and Pococke, mankind were content to admire the beauty of Homer's painting, without caring what particular hillock sate to him for its portrait; and the controversy, first awakened by the venerable Bryant, had not affixed to every streamlet of Priam's empire, a consequence which, in the eye of the philosopher, even now perhaps it hardly possesses. The later tourists also, since Chevalier by mischance first stumbled on Bournabaschi, have found it so much easier to tread in his steps than to seek out a road for themselves, that they have been occupied in the vain attempt to reconcile contradictions on the western bank of the Mender, instead of invading the regions eastward, the ακηρατον λειμωνα

Ενθ' ὅτε ποιμην αξιοι φερβειν βοτά
Ουδ' ηλθε πω σιδηρος.

-Yet it is undoubtedly in this direction that Strabo has taught us to expect the most important discoveries. Ist. In a commanding situation, immediately above the Grecian camp, two miles and a half from the embouchure of the Scamander, and one mile and a half in a direct line from the sea, stood the city of New Ilium, which Lysimachus fortified, and which afterwards became a Roman colony. But, 2dly, forty stadia, or five miles eastward of New Ilium, was a remarkable hill, which even in the days of Strabo retained its Homeric appellation of Callicolone, and whose base was watered by the Simoïs. And it was between these two points, ten stadia from the Callicolone, and thirty from New Ilium, that the village stood which was supposed to mark the site of the ancient capital of Priam.

The ruins which Dr. Clarke discovered at Palaio Callifat, he has undoubtedly good reason for calling those of New Ilium. By his map, indeed, they are too far removed both from the sea and the embouchure of the Mender, and if they are, as he asserts, only three miles and three quarters from the woody and conspicuous Beyan Mezaley-it is impossible that this last can be the Callicolone, which, as Strabo expressly states, was at the distance of forty stadia. Nor is the Callifat Osmak, which is undoubtedly the Simoïs, sufficiently near the Beyan Mezaley. But we know too well the unavoidable inaccuracy of a map taken by an unpractised eye, to lay any great stress on these difficulties; and for the identity of Palaio Callifat with New Ilium there are other evidences to be drawn from Strabo's description. Immediately behind the city, a ridge of high land had its beginning which divided the Scamandrian or exterior, from the Simoïsian or interior plain, a circumstance which exactly corresponds with the limestone range traversed by Dr. Clarke, and supposed by him, with great plausibility, to be the θρωσμος πεδίοιο, where Homer encamps his Trojans. We have no doubt it will be found to communicate with those hills which our travellers crossed between Thymbrik and Tchiblak, and that the