THE PALACE OF BELISARIUS..       90

while her cracked voice screams out in doggerel Spanish a petition for relief, as servile as it is eager; there it is a reckless child, with the marked features of its race, rolling naked under the hot sunshine, and gambolling with the wretched and half-starved dogs of the miserable colony. On one side the visitor is jostled by disease, and on the other persecuted by importunity; while a number of wretched houses have grown up about the ruin, whose dilapidated roofs, shattered lattices, and windows stuffed with rags and grass to exclude the weather, are in melancholy keeping with their inhabitants.

Under these circumstances it will readily be believed that a visit to the desecrated palace of Constantine requires a painful effort on the part of European traveller, whose eyes are taxed with the contemplation and contact of the most nauseous objects; and whose sympathies cannot fail to be excited by a congregated misery which he must feel his utter incapacity to relieve. Nor can the most determined antiquary hope to discover any relic of old to repay him for even an hour's sojourn within the ruin, when he remembers that it is thickly tenanted by a horde of necessitous and keen-witted Hebrews, who are familiar with every recess of the dilapidated edifice.

From afar off the crumbling pile is a noble and majestic object, but, like many and more familiar things, it will not bear a nearer contact without losing all its best attributes. Close beside it the common sewers of the city empty themselves into the port; and, altogether, it may well be said, in the words of Shakespeare - -

It is unsavoury, and smacks not with our humour."