voluptuous name of Sybaris. And I had made a long journey. I had undergone incredible fatigue to give myself this empty satisfaction. How the inhabitants of this easy city would have laughed at me! They could not understand, says Athenæus, why one should quit his country. For themselves they gloried in growing old where they first saw the light. Yet this people practised the broadest hospitality, and, contrary to the policy of most of the Greek states, they readily admitted the colonists of other nations to the rank of citizens. May not this liberal spirit and the astonishing fertility of the soil explain the prosperity of this prosperous town, which is so strangely kept in obscurity by all antiquity? Varro tells us that wheat produced a hundred-fold on the whole territory of Sybaris. At the present time the uplands produce the richest harvests." And this, I am sorry to say, is the only contribution to the history or topography of Sybaris made since the date of Mr. Ingham's voyage. Mons. Montifaut, alas like all the others! hurried across the upland six miles back from the sea. It is as if a traveller from Providence, coming up to Readville, should cross to Watertown and Waltham, and then, going through the Notch of the White Mountains to Montreal, should publish his observations on Boston. And these notes, alas, as late as 1867, are dated like Colonel Ingham's, on the 1st of April! MY VISIT TO SYBARIS. FROM REV. FREDERIC INGHAM'S PAPERS. Ir is a great while since I first took an interest in Sybaris. Sybarites have a bad name. But before I had heard of them anywhere else, I had painfully looked out the words in the three or four precious anecdotes about Sybaris in the old Greek Reader; and I had made up my boy's mind about the Sybarites. When I came to know the name they had got elsewhere, I could not but say that the world had been very unjust to them! O dear! I can see it now, the old Latin schoolroom, where we used to sit, and hammer over that Greek, after the small boys had gone. They went at eleven; we because we were twelve or more stayed till twelve. From eleven to twelve we sat, with only those small boys who had been "kept" for their sins, and Mr. Dillaway. The room was long and narrow; how long and how narrow you may see, if you will go and examine M. Duchesne's model of "Boston as it was," and pay twenty-five cents to the Richmond schools. For all this is of the past; and in the same spot in space where once a month the Exam iner Club now meets at Parker's, and discusses the difference between religion and superstition, the folly of copyright, and the origin of things, the boys who did not then belong to the Examiner Club, say Fox and Clarke and Furness and Waldo Emerson, thumbed their Græca Minora or their Greek Readers in "Boston as it was," and learned the truth about Sybaris! A long, narrow room, I say, whose walls, when I knew them first, were of that tawny orange wash which is appropriated to kitchens. But, by a master stroke of Mr. Dillaway's, these walls were made lilac or purple one summer vacation. We sat, to recite, on long settees, pea-green in color, which would teeter slightly on the well-worn floor. There, for an hour daily, while brighter boys than I recited, I sat an hour musing, looking at the immense Jacobs's Greek Reader, and waiting my turn to come. If you did not look off your book much, no harm came to you. So, in the hour, you got fifty-three minutes and a few odd seconds of day-dream, for six minutes and two thirds of reciting, unless, which was unusual, some fellow above you broke down, and a question, passed along of a sudden, recalled you to modern life. I have been sitting on that old green settee, and at the same time riding on horseback in Virginia, through an open wooded country, with one of Lord Fairfax's grandsons and two pretty cousins of his, and a fallow deer has just appeared in the distance, when, by the failure of Hutchinson or Wheeler, just above me, poor Mr. Dillaway |