of their cities, the grandeur of their
temples, equalled if they did not surpass those of their fatherland. About
the year 480 before Christ, a fierce enemy landed on the coast of Sicily
with two thousand gallies: this was the warlike Carthaginian, whose altars
smoked with the sacrifice of human victims. This formidable invader was
defeated under the great Gelon of Syracuse, who was called the father of
his country; but the Carthaginians, returned again and with better
fortune, at length became masters of the island. The Romans next conquered
Sicily, and held it for several centuries. The Saracens in the ninth
century were in the full tide of successful conquest. They landed first in
the bay of Mazara, near Selinuntium, and after various conflicts and
fortune, finally subjugated the whole island in the year 878. The crescent
continued to glitter over the towers of Sicily for about three centuries,
when the Normans, a band of adventurers whom the crusades of the Holy
Sepulchre had brought from their northern homes, after a conflict of
thirty years under Count Roger, expelled the Saracen in the year 1073, and
planted the banner of the cross in every city of the land. Soon after that
time it came under Spain and Austria; France and England have severally
been its rulers. It is now under the crown of Naples.

Such is a brief outline of the eventful history of Sicily; a land formed
by nature in her fairest mould; but which the crimes and ambition of men
have desecrated by violence, oppression, and bloodshed; and with the
substitution of a word, one might exclaim with the poet:

'SICILIA! O SICILIA! thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty, which became
A funeral dower of present woes and past,
On thy sweet brow is sorrow ploughed by shame,
And annals graved in characters of flame.
Oh GOD! that thou wert in thy nakedness
Less lovely or more powerful, and couldst claim
Thy right, and awe the robbers back who press
To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress!'

Her brightest age was when the Greek threw the light of his genius around
her; when rose those mighty temples which now, even in their ruin, call
forth the wonder and admiration of the traveller; her greatest degradation
was in the age just passed away. As an exemplification of this, it is
sufficient to say, that from the time of the Norman until the accession of
the present monarch, a space of seven hundred years, not a sin