t very good ones are still taken off Ancona, in the
Adriatic, where the _spatium admirabile Rhombi_, as the reader will,
or ought to recollect, was taken and sent to Domitian at Albano by
_Procaccio_ or _Estafetta_. Juvenal complains that the Tyrrhene sea
was exhausted by the demand for fish, though there was no _Lent_ in
those times. If the Catholic clergy insist that there _was_, we beg
to object, that the keepers thereof were probably not in a condition
to compete with the _Apiciuses_ of the day, who bought fish for their
_bodies'_, and not for their SOULS' SAKE.

CATANIA.

Tum Catane nimium ardenti vicina Typhaeo.

After a pleasant drive of twenty miles, we find ourselves at
_Aci-Reale_, where a street, called "Galatea," reminds us
unexpectedly of a very classical place called Dean's Yard, where we
once had doings with _Acis_, as he figures in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_.
We were here in luck, and, having purchased some fine coins of
several of the tyrants of Sicily from the apothecary, proceeded on
our way to Catania. In half an hour we reach the basaltic Isles of
the Cyclops, and the Castle of Acis, whom the peasants hereabouts
tell you was their king, when Sicily was under the Saracenic yoke.
The river _Lecatia_, now lost, is supposed formerly to have issued
hereabouts, in the port of Ulysses. Our next move placed us amidst
the silk-slops of Catania. We have hardly been five minutes in the
town, when offers abound to conduct us up AEtna, in whom, as so much
national wealth, the inhabitants seem to take as much interest as in
her useful and productive silk-looms. Standing fearless on the
pavement of lava that buried their ancient city, they point up with
complacency to its fountains above. The mischievous exploits of AEtna,
in past times, are in every mouth, and children learn their AEtnean
catechism as soon as they are breeched. AEtna here is all in all.
Churches are constructed out of his quarried _viscera_--great men lie
in tombs, of which the stones once ran liquid down his flames--snuff
is taken out of lava boxes--and devotion carves the crucifix on lava,
and numbers its beads on a lava rosary--nay, the apothecary's mortar
was sent him down from the great mortar-battery above, and the
village _belle_ wears fire-proof bracelets that were once too hot to
be meddled with. Go to the museum, and you will call it a museum of
AEtnean products. Nodulated, porous, condensed, streaked, spotted,
clouded, granulated lav