sed to see this notable project revived, or to hear
that the Greeks were on the point of sinking new shafts at the silver
mines of Laurium. A joint-stock company, either for the one or the
other, would be quite as profitable to the capitalists engaged as the
scheme of making sugar from beet-root at Thermopylae, which has found
some unfortunate shareholders, both at Athens and Paris. Travellers,
scholars, and antiquaries, would undoubtedly take more interest in the
progress of the canal, and of the silver mine, than in the confection
of the sugar.

[1] Aristotolis Politic, lib. v. cap. 10, Sec. 22, p. 193.--Ed. Tauch.

[2] A collection of the classic authorities for the different attempts
at cutting the canal through the isthmus of Corinth, may be interesting
to some of our readers. PERIANDER'S Diogenes Laertius, i. 99--DEMETRIUS
POLIORCETES, Strabo, vol. i. p. 86, ed. Tauch.--JULIUS CAESAR, Dion
Cassius, xliv. 5. Plutarch in Caesar, lviii. Suetonius in Caesar.
xliv.--CALIGULA, Suetonius in Calig. xxi.--NERO, Plinii, N.H. iv. 4.
Lucian, Nero. Philostratus in vit. Apollon. Tyan. iv. 24. Zonaras, i.
570, ed. Paris.--HERODES ATTICUS, Philostratus in vit. Sophist. ii. 26.

There was another canal in Greece which proved a sad stumbling-block to
the Roman satirist Juvenal, whose unlucky accusation of "lying Greece,"
is founded on his own ignorance of a fact recorded by Herodotus and
Thucydides.

--"Creditur olim
Velificatus Athos, et quicquid Graecia mendax
Audet in historia."

The words of Herodotus and Thucydides, would leave no doubt of Xerxes
having made a canal through the isthmus to the north of Mount Athos, in
the mind of any but a Roman.[1] But since there are modern travellers
as ready to distrust the ancients, as a gentleman we once encountered
at Athens was to doubt the moderns, we shall quote better evidence than
any Greek. Our acquaintance of the Athenian inn, who had a very elegant
appearance, appealed to us to confirm the _Graecia mendax_, saying, he
had just returned from Marathon, and his guide had been telling him far
greater lies than he ever heard from an Italian cicerone. "The fellow
had the impudence to say, that his countrymen had defeated 500,000
Persians in the plain he showed me," said the gentleman in green. "Let
alone the number--that fable might be pardoned--but he thought me such
an egregious ass as not to know that the war was with the Turks, and
not with th