The quotation is Lady Montague's. Descending a league farther down the Hellespont, she landed at the promontory of Sigeum, and climbed up to visit the barrow beneath which the heroic bones of Achilles repose. Experiencing no enthusiasm at the sight of these Homeric scenes, she was unquestionably right in not affecting what she did not feel; but who, save herself, could have viewed the plains of Troy, the Simois, and the Scamander without having any other ideas awakened in the mind than such as the adventure of Æschines's companion and the lewd tale of Lafontaine had implanted there? However, to do her justice, though she gives her favourite ideas the precedence, she afterward observes, "there is some pleasure in seeing the valley where I imagined the famous duel of Menelaus and Paris had been fought, and where the greatest city in the world was situated." Here, though she is mistaken about the magnitude of the city, there is some sign of the only feeling which ever ought to lead a traveller out of his way to behold such a scene; and she goes on to say, "I spent several hours here in as agreeable cogitations as ever Don Quixote had on Mount Montesinos;" in which cogitations let us be charitable enough to suppose that "the tale of Troy divine" was not forgotten.
From the Hellespont they sailed between the islands of the Archipelago, and passing by Sicily and Malta, where they landed, were driven by a storm into Porta Farina, on the coast of Africa, near Tunis, where they remained at the house of the British consul for some days. Being so near the ruins of Carthage, her curiosity to behold so remarkable a spot was not to be resisted; and accordingly she proceeded to the scene, through groves of date, olive, and fig-trees; but the most extraordinary objects she met with were the women of the country, who were so frightfully ugly that her delicate imagination immediately suggested to her the
