distant about fifty-five miles, and, passing through Portici, Nocera was the first town of notice that we reached. Its ancient history is brief and melancholy. Known in the days of Annibal as Nuceria, it resisted to the utmost of its powers the successful Carthaginian, but was ultimately starved, plundered, and burnt. (Livy, sec. xv. book xxiii.) fame demum in deditionem accepit.

And again

Nuceriæ præda militi data est; urbs direpta, atque incensa.

La Cava, with its endless porticoes, came next; and we halted at Salerno before mid-day.

The extreme beauty of this place determined us to stay here for the remainder of the day, and the first object we went to see was its very ancient Cathedral. The Mosaics with which it is partially adorned were brought from the temples of Pæstum ; and the two most striking objects in the church are its antique Pulpits, or Ambones. All travellers would visit this church from respect for these relics of antiquity, though none, I think, will linger there longer from admiration of any other beauty.

This duty done, we scrambled down the cliff to the beach to enjoy the varied, and never satiating, prospects of nature. Salerno is on the shores of the Tyrrhene Sea; was the country of the Picentini; and once was famous for its medical school.

In the graceful curve of its shore it somewhat resembles Naples, but bounded by a more contracted line, and rather oval form, the eye takes in at one glance the entire town; house over house upon its pendant hills down to the sands of the boundless ocean; the rocks, and cliffs, verdant even to the water's edge.

Our room at the inn commanded the whole expanse, and in the month of February we dined in the open air, having moved our table to the balcony to feast upon the scenery around, the boundless, and tranquil, ocean, with the magnificence of a setting sun amid such prospects..

The Promontory of Sorrentum, on the west, famed for its Campanian grape, stretches into the ocean, forming one boundary of Salerno; halfway up the acclivity hangs the little town of Vietri, its whitened villas embedded in the verdant hills; and behind this promontory was the setting sun, on whose glorious orb we gazed as it illumined the wide ocean with its golden beams, diffusing purply mists, and shadows, on all the hills around till it sank tranquilly from view, and till the moon arose to shed a colder, chaster, light. It was a scene reminding me of our great lyric bard's description,

Where the sun loves to pause

With so fond a delay,

That the night only draws

A thin veil o'er the day. Moore's Melodies.

To these charms of nature were superadded the recollection of the charms of song, for only at a few miles distance were the Sirenuse, the three rocky islands where the three Siren sisters dwelt. Thus, we were gazing on the very spot where Ulysses had sailed, and Æneas also; where music once was which no one who listened to hear ever lived to tell of; and which death Ulysses by force and stratagem, only, had escaped.*

At four the next morning we started again, and within six miles of Pæstum passed the Silarus, Silaro, or Sele, the ancient boundary between the Lucanians and Picentini, a stream possessing the quality of petrifying roots, leaves, earth or sprigs: -to which river; to mount Alburnus, seen in the distance, and to the Tanager that springs from it, Virgil alludes in his third Georgics, v. 146. It is said, that, even to this hour, the Gad-fly continues to infest the plains, and to torture the cattle, as it did in the days, and as it is described in those lines of the Mantuan Bard.

About mid-day we arrived at Pæstum, and within view of the oldest Grecian temples in existence. This city is supposed to have been founded by the Dorians, who came from Dora in Phoenicia. In process of time, the Sybarites, a Grecian colony, sprung from the Achæans, invaded,

Vide vol. ii. p. 56.