by losing its grossness'; but public virtue ceases to be
useful when it sickens at the calamities of necessary war. The
moment that nations become confident of security, they give way to
corruption. The evils and dangers of war seem as requisite for the
preservation of public morals as the laws themselves; at least it is
the melancholy moral of history, that when nations resolve to be
peaceful with respect to their neighbours, they begin to be vicious
with respect to themselves. But to return to the travellers.

On the 14th of December they hired a boat with fourteen men and ten
oars, and sailed to Salona; thence they proceeded to Crisso, and rode
on to Delphi, ascending the mountain on horseback, by a steep, craggy
path towards the north-east. After scaling the side of Parnassus for
about an hour, they saw vast masses of rock, and fragments of stone,
piled in a perilous manner above them, with niches and sepulchres,
and relics, and remains on all sides.

They visited and drank of Castalia, and the prophetic font, Cassotis;
but still, like every other traveller, they were disappointed.
Parnassus is an emblem of the fortune that attends the votaries of
the Muses, harsh, rugged, and barren. The woods that once waved on
Delphi's steep have all passed away, and may now be sought in vain.

A few traces of terraces may yet be discovered--here and there the
stump of a column, while niches for receiving votive offerings are
numerous among the cliffs, but it is a lone and dismal place;
Desolation sits with Silence, and Ruin there is so decayed as to be
almost Oblivion.

Parnassus is not so much a single mountain as the loftiest of a
range; the cloven summit appears most conspicuous when seen from the
south. The northern view is, however, more remarkable, for the cleft
is less distinguishable, and seven lower peaks suggest, in
contemplation with the summits, the fancy of so many seats of the
Muses. These peaks, nine in all, are the first of the hills which
receive the rising sun, and the last that in the evening part with
his light.

From Delphi the travellers proceeded towards Livadia, passing in the
course of the journey the confluence of the three roads where OEdipus
slew his father, an event with its hideous train of fatalities which
could not be recollected by Byron on the spot, even after the tales
of guilt he had gathered in his Albanian journeys, without agitating
associations.

At Livadia they remained the