Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/243

Rh bind together that it is not to be broken or crack'd by blows either of stone or iron without very much ado. And that which is more to be admired is the proportion and figure of the cavity within, which is compos'd and proportioned after such a manner as not possible to receive or admit any other thing than the bird that built it: for to anything else it is so impenetrable, close and shut, that nothing can enter, not so much as the water of the sea." Can we wonder at a "pious opinion" being grounded on facts as circumstantially authenticated as these?

HIS is in all respects a work which proclaims the age that has produced it. It is the production of a Society of erudite Athenians, who have shown that they in no respect fall short of other associations for corresponding pursuits, whether they be found in Paris or London, Berlin or Rome, and yet scarcely half a century intervenes between the actual Athens which has sent forth this learned and elegant book and the fallen city which Lord Byron saw and deplored—a city of rude huts and ruder pallikaria, governed by a low Turkish official, a Disdar who was to obtain a bad immortality little inferior to that of him "who fired the Ephesian dome," he being in fact the man whose potshots at the Theseus of the Parthenon were to inflict irreparable injuries upon that masterpiece of Pheidias, the dull times affording this too energetic administrator no other sufficient amusement or occupation.