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338 NOTICES OF BOOKS.
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
The Excavations " Carthage At Carthage A...
of mosaics and inscriptions now deposited in the British Museum , should be especiallinteresting to English people . Carthage may
not unfairly be described y as the England of antiquity . Her free but oligarchical governmenther immense commercial activity , and
her love of colonizing , all testif , y to the truth of the parallel . Just as we now send out our swarms to Australia and New Zealand , so
did Carthage part with her children to found Marseilles and Cadiz , Nayin those dayswhen the Mediterranean itself was a vast water
whose , shores were , very imperfectly defined to the imagination ol even the most learned ancientsthe men of Carthage had the
audacity to row through the gates , of Hercules , out past what we now call Gibraltar , to the outer and unknown sea . Their vessels
crawled down the west coast of Africa , where they left _traces in the shape of settlementsand actually made their way north as far as
Cornwall in Britain- , where they worked for tin , and where we yet often find traces of their , visits . The feats of our greatest navigators
in the days of Q , ueen Elizabeth , and of our later explorers in the Arctic seas , did not show more daring than did those of the early
voyagers , who , with none of the helps of modern navigation , tempted the dangers of worlds unrealized 5 ; which , moreover , were to them
peopled by monsters , demons , spirits , men with two heads and one eye , and mouths in the middle of their stomachs . There was nothing awful and outrageous which was not a current fable in those
days on the shores of the Mediterranean , and nothing therefore which sailors did not run the risk of encountering when they
launched upon the unknown sea . My own visit to Carthage took place under very different auspices
—amidst the refinement of modern French travelling ; and I walked over the lain and visited the cottage in which Dr . Davis was
purp suing his labors , with a , party of English gentlemen , who rushed about like eager schoolboystapping and measuring the ruins with
their canes , and quoting Latin , at every step . They were'the exact representatives of Lord Maeaulay ' s famous New Zealander standing
on a broken arch of London Bridge and contemplating the ruins of St . Paul's and the poetry of the whole scene struck so forcibly upon
my imagination , that after the lapse of _foiir years it is as fresh in my memory as if it had happened last week .
My readers will not , I hope , think it an insult if I recall to them the geographical position of Carthage . I plead guilty to a general
inability to realize the locality of any famous place which I have not actually visited , and should often be thankful for a few hints
which would fixit . in my memory . For instance , how many people would believeunless it were actually impressed upon them , that
Algiers lies north , of Malaga in Spain , and Edinburgh west of Liverpool ?
Carthage , then , was built on the north coast of Africa , just at that point which runs up nearest to Italy . This is the key to her history ,
and one of the physical causes of her ruin . This was why , when
338 Notices Of Books.
338 NOTICES OF BOOKS .
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), July 1, 1861, page 338, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01071861/page/50/
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