summer of Ajaccio to winter on these heights, where no flowers are visible but the pale hellebore and tiny lilac crocuses.  Snow-drifts stretch by the roadside, and one by one the pioneers of the vast pine-woods of the interior appear.  A great portion of the pine-forest (Pinus larix, or Corsican pine, not larch) between Bocognano and Corte had recently been burned by accident when we passed by.  Nothing could be more forlorn than the black leafless stems and branches emerging from the snow.  Some of these trees were mast-high, and some mere saplings.  Corte itself is built among the mountain fastnesses of the interior.  The snows and granite cliffs of Monte Rotondo overhang it to the north-west, while two fair valleys lead downward from its eyrie to the eastern coast.  The rock on which it stands rises to a sharp point, sloping southward, and commanding the valleys of the Golo and the Tavignano.  Remembering that Corte was the old capital of Corsica, and the centre of General Paoli’s government, we are led to compare the town with Innsprueck, Meran, or Grenoble.  In point of scenery and situation it is hardly second to any of these mountain-girdled cities; but its poverty and bareness are scarcely less striking than those of Bocognano.

The whole Corsican character, with its stern love of justice, its furious revengefulness and wild passion for freedom, seems to be illustrated by the peculiar elements of grandeur and desolation in this landscape.  When we traverse the forest of Vico or the rocky pasture-lands of Niolo, the history of the Corsican national heroes, Giudice della Rocca and Sampiero, becomes intelligible, nor do we fail to understand some of the mysterious attraction which led the more daring spirits of the island to prefer a free life among the macchi and pine-woods to placid lawful occupations in farms and villages.  The lives of the two men whom I have mentioned are so prominent in Corsican history, and are so often still upon the lips of the common people, that it may be well to sketch their outlines in the foreground of the Salvator Rosa landscape just described.  Giudice was the governor of Corsica, as lieutenant for the Pisans, at the end of the thirteenth century.  At that time the island belonged to the republic of Pisa, but the Genoese were encroaching on them by land and sea, and the whole life of their brave champion was spent in a desperate struggle with the invaders, until at last he died, old, blind, and in prison, at the command of his savage foes.  Giudice was the title which the Pisans usually conferred upon their governor, and Della Rocca deserved it by right of his own inexorable love of justice.  Indeed, justice seems to have been with him a passion, swallowing up all other feelings of his nature.  All the stories which are told of him turn upon this point in his character; and though they may not be strictly true, they illustrate the stern virtues for which he was celebrated among the Corsicans, and show what