rinth. It was
some advantage, indeed, to travel in the shade in a land where the summer
heats were intense, and refreshing rains of rare occurrence; but it was a
still greater recommendation to these covered ways that they enabled the
priests to assemble without displaying upon the broad highway of the Nile
the times and numbers of their synods. The pyramidal temples of Benares
communicated by vaulted paths with the Ganges, as the chamber of Cheops
communicated with the Nile. The capital of Assyria was similarly
furnished with covered roads, which enabled the priests of Bel to
communicate with one another, and with the royal palace, in a city three
days' journey in length and three in breadth. Civilization and
barbarism, indeed, in this respect met each another, and the caves of the
Troglodyte AEthiopians on the western shore of the Red Sea were connected
by numerous vaulted passages cut in the solid limestone, along which the
droves of cattle passed securely in the rainy season to their winter
stalls from the meadows of the Nile and the Astaboras.

Of the civil history of Carthage we know unfortunately but little. The
colonists of Tyre and Sidon are to the ages a dumb nation. All we know
of them is through the accounts of their bitter foes, the Greeks of
Sicily and the Romans. It is much the same as if the only records of
Manchester and Birmingham were to be transmitted to posterity by the
speeches of Mr. George Frederic Young. Yet we know that the
Carthaginians alone, among the nations of antiquity, made long
voyages,--perchance even doubled the Cape three thousand years before
Vasco de Gama broke the silence of the southern seas; and we are certain
also that their caravan traffic with Central Africa and the coasts of the
Red Sea passed along defined and permeable roads, with abiding land-marks
of hostelry, well, and column. And we know more than this. The Romans,
who jealously denied to other nations all the praise for arts or arms
which they could withhold, yet accorded to the Carthaginians the
invention of that solid intessellation of granite-blocks which is beheld
still upon the fragments of the Appian Road. The highways which conveyed
to the warehouses of Carthage the ivory, gold-dust, slaves, and aromatic
gums of Central Libya ran through miles of well-ordered gardens and by
hundreds of villas; and it was the ruthless destruction of these
country-seats of the merchant-princes of Byrsa, which forced upo