have overlooked, how the main
passage described above communicates with several smaller ones in its
progress, and that a small stair was a subsequent contrivance or
afterthought meant to relieve, on emergency, the overcharged large
one; its workmanship and style showed it plainly to have been added
when the edifice had already become _an antiquity_. This altogether
peculiar and most interesting building has also suffered still later
interpolations: a Saracenic frieze runs round the wall; so that the
hands of three widely different nations have been busy on the
mountain theatre, which received its _first audience_ twenty-five
centuries ago! The view obtained from this spot has often been
celebrated, and deserves to be. Such mountains we had often seen
before; such a sky is the usual privilege of Sicily; these indented
_bays_, which break so beautifully the line of the coast, had been an
object of our daily admiration; the hoary side of the majestic Etna,
and Naxos with its castellated isthmus, might be seen from _other_
elevated situations; and the acuminated tops of Mola, with its
Saracenic tower, were commanded by neighbouring sites--Taormina
_alone_, and for its _own_ sake, was the great and paramount object
in our eyes, and possessed us wholly! We had been following _Lyell_
half the day in antediluvian remains; but what are the bones of
_Ichthyosauri_ or _Megalotheria_ to this gigantic skeleton of Doric
antiquity, round which lie scattered the sepulchres of its ancient
audiences, Greek, Roman, and Oriental--tombs which had become already
an object of speculation, and been rifled for arms, vases, or gold
rings, before Great Britain had made the first steps beyond painted
barbarism!

The eruptions of Etna have all been recorded. Thucydides mentions one
of them episodically in the Peloponesian war. From the cooled caldron
that simmers under all that snow, has proceeded all the lava that the
ancients worked into these their city walls. The houses of
Taurominium were built of and upon _lava_, which it requires a
thousand years to disintegrate. After dinner we walk to Naxos,
saluting the statue of the patron of a London parish, _St Pancras_,
on our way. He stands on the beach here, and claims, by inscription
on his pedestal, to have belonged to the apostolic times, St Peter
himself having, he says, appointed him to his bishopric. He is patron
of Taormina, where he has possessed himself of a Greek temple; and he
also pro