Ragusa also produced Latin poets, and a race of historians, among whom may be mentioned Cervario Tuberone, Nicolas Ragnina, and, greatest of all, Anselmo Banduri, whose name is of European renown. The breadth of the Ragusan genius is illustrated by the fact that her additions to the exact sciences are as splendid as the works of her imagination. Her citizens Gazoli, Antonius Medus, Ghetaldi, and at a later period Boscović, rank among the patriarchs of astronomy and mathematics. Marino Ghetaldi, born at Ragusa in 1566, anticipated Descartes in the application of algebra to geometry, and lays a claim to the invention of the telescope. Amongst other feats he tested the experiment of Archimedes, and is said to have consumed a boat with his burning-glass. On the shore of a bay to the south of Ragusa is still pointed out the fern-valanced cavern where Ghetaldi loved to pursue his discoveries; and such was the impression wrought by the man of science on the popular mind, that to this day the sailor, as he passes the mouth of Ghetaldi’s cave, invokes St. Blasius to frustrate the incantations of the magician.

The literary and commercial bloom of Ragusa continued to the middle of the seventeenth century, little abated by a plague, which in 1526 destroyed twenty thousand of the population in six months; or by the loss of many ships in the Spanish service. But Ragusa had already received warnings of a more tremendous catastrophe, such as had befallen her Roman ancestress Epidaurus. In 1520, 1521, 1536, and 1639, the city had suffered from shocks of earthquake.

It was half-past eight o’clock on the morning of April the 6th, the Wednesday in Holy Week, 1667. The Maggior Consiglio was about to hold a session, for the purpose of according grace to delinquents, and the Rector of the Republic, Simeon Ghetaldi, and some of the councillors, were already preparing to take their places. The inhabitants of Ragusa were mostly at home, or in the churches at morning prayer, when, without a moment’s warning, a tremendous shock of earthquake overwhelmed the whole city and entombed a fifth of the population in the ruins. The Rector of the Republic, five-sixths of the nobles, nine-tenths of the clergy, a Dutch ambassador with his suite of thirty, then on his way to Constantinople, and six thousand citizens, were buried. Marble palaces—the accumulated embellishments of ages of prosperity—valuable libraries, archives, irreplaceable manuscripts—all alike perished. The sea left the harbour dry four times, and rising to a mountainous height, four times threatened to engulf the land. The ships in the port were sucked into the vortex of the deep, or dashed to pieces against each other or the rocks. The wells were dried up. Huge cliffs were split from top to bottom. The sky was darkened by a dense cloud of sand. The earthquake was succeeded by a fire, and a strong gale springing up spread the flames over every quarter of the ruins. Finally, to complete the catastrophe, the wild Morlachs descended from the mountains and pillaged what remained.

Ragusa never recovered from the blow. Her commerce was for long reduced to the coast-traffic of small trabaccoli. Her literature, indeed, partly revived; and during the early years of the French war the neutrality of Ragusa secured for her once more much of the Mediterranean carrying trade, and by the end of the last century her population amounted to 15,000. But, in 1806, Napoleon seized Ragusa, and two years later an adjutant of General Marmont announced that the Republic of Ragusa had ceased to exist. It yet remained for the diplomatists of the Allied Powers to consummate in cold blood what Buonaparte had perpetrated in the frenzy of his ambition; and at the Congress of Vienna an English plenipotentiary set his signature to a document by which the ancient Republic was handed over to what was then the most brutal and despotic government in Europe. Since that date Ragusa has been the head town of a ‘circle,’ and the stately palace of her Rectors has sunk into the ‘bureau’ of an Austrian ‘Kreis-chef!’

And yet how fascinating is Ragusa still! It far surpassed our most sanguine expectations. We entered the once sovereign city by the Porta Pille, one of two gates which form the north and south poles of the little town, and are the only public openings in the circuit of its massive walls. From a niche above this portal the old saviour of the Republic, St. Blasius, looked down upon us benignantly, with finger raised aloft in the act of benediction; and the same figure of his saintship occurs at intervals all round the walls, which have been likened to a girdle of amulets. The Porta Pille passed, we found ourselves in the Stradone or Corso, the main street of Ragusa, and the finest and widest in Dalmatia.

From the student of Ragusan history this street claims a peculiar interest. Originally it was nothing else than a narrow channel of sea—the ‘silver streak’ that moated off the Roman rock asylum of Lavve from the more rustic dwellings of Serbian Dubrovnik, scattered among the pine-trees on the rocky steep of the adjoining mainland. But in the thirteenth century, when the antagonism between Serb and Roman had already ceased, and the Serbian language had become the mother-tongue of the descendants of the Epidauritan refugees, the channel was filled in and the site levelled to make room for an airy piazza,[355] where, in the succeeding age, stately palaces of four or five storeys rose on either side, and rivalled those of Venice in their magnificence. Thus what had originally been a barrier between two hostile nationalities, has since become a bond of union, as the favourite meeting place and social promenade for all classes of Ragusan citizens. The lofty palaces of the original Piazza were overwhelmed by the great earthquake, and their loftiness made them terribly destructive of life, so that when the Senate rebuilt this part of the city the height of the new houses was limited to two, or at most three, storeys. The Piazza itself shrank into the present Stradone, in sympathy with the straitened circumstances of New Ragusa; but, shadow as it is of its former majesty, it still forms a noble thoroughfare.

Every building on either side, as indeed throughout the town, is of fine stone, and the street—like all other streets of Ragusa—is paved with large deftly squared slabs, which take the polish of marble, and caused us to slip more than once. Immediately on entering we passed on the right a fifteenth-century cistern[356] decorated with quaint heads of dragons; it is from this that Ragusa derives her water supply, brought hither by a conduit from a mountain source fifteen miles off. Opposite is the Chiesa del Redentore, in classic Venetian style, the elaborate carvings of its façade thrown into exquisite reliefs by the golden colours of the stone; and above its portal an inscription recording the building of the church (legend says that the matrons of Ragusa brought hither the material) after the earthquake of 1536—ad avertendam cœlestem iram in maximo terræ tremore. Alas! it averted not a greater ruin, though by some strange irony of fortune it survived the earthquake of 1667, to stand a monument of disregarded piety. Next is the Franciscan convent in several tastes, and then, on either side of the road, a vista of solid stone houses, built with great regularity in a plain but dignified style, with classic cornices.

A five minutes’ walk—such a little place is this!—brought us to the other end of the city, the street terminating abruptly in the Porta Plocce, the sea-gate, and otherwise the south-pole of Ragusa. But just before reaching this, the Stradone opens on the right on to a small Piazza, where the most beautiful and interesting edifices in Ragusa are congregated.

Everywhere around is something which takes us back to the most glorious days of the Republic. Opposite is a living monument of that mechanical genius which shines in the great works of Ghetaldi and Boscović. This is the Torre del Orologio, with a domical cupola containing a wonderful clock, in which a revolving globe shows the moon’s age, and two bronze figures of men in armour strike a bell to tell the hours. Upon the bell are the Latin lines:—

To the left is a beautiful Moresco-Gothic building, the Dogana and Zecca or Mint of the Republic—at present serving as the Ricevitoria principale of the Emperor and King. From here issued forth those half Byzantine pieces with their saintly Blasius and ‘Tuta Salus’ scroll, of which we had seen so many examples on the former sites of Ragusan industry in Bosnia. The Mint, which is behind the Dogana, I visited in company with Signor Vincenzo Adamović, who is one of the representatives of numismatics in modern Ragusa, and who, besides possessing a considerable collection, has published some interesting essays on the medallic history of the Republic. The coins of Ragusa date back, according to Signor Adamović, at least to the ninth century. The earliest coin is of brass, bearing the Byzantine name ‘Follaris’ or ‘Obolus,’ and displaying on the obverse a laureated head, evidently, like some of our Anglo-Saxon monetary effigies of the same date, copied from the fourth-century coinage of the Roman Empire. The earliest silver coin, the Grosso or Denaro, dates from the end of the thirteenth century,[358] and is the first coin on which St. Blasius makes his appearance. The Mint is at present converted into a granary for oats, so that there is little to remark inside the building except an inscription over the massive arch of the standard office of weights and measures:—

The present Zecca and Dogana were built in the year 1520, and are among the few buildings which by their massive construction withstood the shock of the great earthquake of 1667. But there is another building hard by, of greater antiquity and more absorbing interest, which has also happily come down to us uninjured. The Palazzo Rettorale, the residence of the old Rectors of the Republic, whose rich colonnade faces the Piazzetta on the left, is a monumental epitome of Ragusan history—the grandest relic of the ancient commonwealth. An inscription on the exterior records that it was founded in 1435 ‘by the nobles and most prudent citizens of Ragusa, under the divine auspices of Blasius, martyr and most holy priest, being patron of this city of Epidaura Ragusa.’[359] The date of its completion, 1452, takes us back to the period when the commerce and literature of Ragusa were first bursting into bloom. The style of the architecture, Florentine, and not Venetian, is typical of the Tuscan source whence Ragusan literature drew its earliest inspiration, and bids a kind of architectural defiance to the Lion of St. Mark. This is not so huge a pile as the palace of the Doges, but neither has it that element of barbaresqueness. These massive arches and the backbone of iron girders within, which enabled the building to withstand the terrific ordeal of the earthquake, characterise well the sober sense and heroic endurance of the citizens who reared it.

This is the Lararium of the Republic. Within are the effigies of her greatest heroes and benefactors, the archives of her history,[360] the rolls of her nobility. This is a treasure-house of the associations of every age of Ragusan story. The stone benches in the porch beneath the spacious arcade are the same on which the senators and patricians of old used to discuss the gravest affairs of state. The massiveness of the Roman arches and that classic colonnade may well be taken to betray the spirit of that race to which the ancient rock of asylum owed her first foundations; the too imaginative patriotism of Ragusa has even gone farther, and claims the capitals themselves to have been transported hither from the Epidauritan mother-city. On one of these is carved an alchemist, seated book in hand amidst his crucibles and alembics, and a Latin inscription[361] of apparently the same date as the sculpture, informs the spectator that he is viewing the inventor of medical arts—Æsculapius, ‘the glory of his birth-place, Ragusa.’ At least it records the pious devotion of mediæval Ragusa to her Roman penates; and though the Cupids that sport amidst the acanthus-leaves of the other capitals were certainly never carved at Epidaurus, we may yet see in them an interesting tribute of Ragusa to the beautiful paganism of the Renascence.

In a corner of the fine columniated court within the palace lies the monument of Orlando, whose exploits in slaying the Saracen Emir have been already recorded. Near it stood of old the banner of the second saviour of the Republic—San Biagio. In the middle of the court is a patinated bronze bust of a man with peaked beard and somewhat careworn expression, and, on the pedestal, the inscription ‘Michaeli Prazzato benemerito Civi ex S.C. MDCXXXVIII.’ Michael Prazzato was a well-deserving citizen indeed! He left no less than 200,000 Genoese doubloons to the Republic—a sum equivalent to 600,000l. of our money—but the actual equivalent of which in the present day would have to be reckoned in millions. Such were the merchant princes of Ragusa! But the monument, curiously enough, recorded the catastrophe as well as the prosperity of the city. On the back of the pedestal was a further inscription commemorating the overthrow of the bust by ‘the great earthquake,’ and its setting up anew. The head had been seriously caved in behind.

In the ‘Mother Church’ of the neighbouring, formerly Ragusan, island of Mezzo, is another memorial of Michele Prazzato, a napkin which once belonged to Charles V. At a time when Spain was desolated by a famine, Prazzato earned the gratitude of her sovereign by transporting there large cargoes of grain in his huge carracks. Hearing of Prazzato’s presence, the Emperor called him in, it is said, while he was shaving, and offered him a large sum of money,—titles, and office under his government. ‘Sire,’ replied our merchant prince, ‘if I am satiated with riches it is that I never took them as a gift; if I am king on board my carracks, it is that I never sought for honours; if I am a free citizen of my fatherland, Ragusa, it is that I have never sought for titles. As a remembrance of your sovereign favour, grant me rather this napkin.’[362] Charles V., struck at such greatness of soul, took what was asked for from beneath his beard and handed it to Prazzato.

But walled into a doorway at the side of Prazzato’s monument is another inscription recording patriotic devotion of a still higher order. Nicola Bunić[363] has well deserved the title of the Ragusan Regulus. It was after the great calamity of 1667, when Ragusa was beginning a new start in life, that Kara Mustapha, intent on strangling her new birth, sent in a monstrous claim for 146,000 dollars. The senate and citizens of Ragusa, who knew the personal animosity of Mustapha against the Republic, were in despair. At this critical juncture two citizens, who had already rendered themselves eminent by their efforts in remedying the effects of the earthquake and in repulsing the Morlach incursions, volunteered to risk their lives in averting the storm. One was Marino Caboga[364] and the other Nicola Bunić. On their arrival the Grand Vizier attempted to extract from them a treaty surrendering Ragusa to the Turk. They refused, and were thrown into noisome dungeons. Caboga, after languishing several years in captivity, was enabled to return to Ragusa and receive the acclamations of his fellow-citizens. This slab was the only homage which the Republic could offer to Bunić. The inscription, Englished, is as follows:—‘To Nicola Bunić, a Senator of singular discreetness, who, in the most perilous times of the Commonwealth, undertook of his own accord a most perilous embassy to the neighbouring Pashà of Bosnia, and being sent on by him by way of Silistria to the Turkish Sultan, there, after long imprisonment, died in chains for the liberty of his country, and who by his death and constancy of soul hath earned an immortal name through all posterity; to the honour and memory of whom this monument is by decree of the Senate set up, in the year 1678.’[365]

Near the Palazzo Rettorale rises the Duomo of St. Mary—but alas! except the foundations on which the present building rests, not one stone has been left upon another of Cœur-de-Lion’s original cathedral. In the present eighteenth-century Italian edifice there is little to arrest the attention; but the Reliquiario[366] is wonderful! When Ragusan commerce was at its acmè, ‘the merchants of the Republic,’ we read, ‘collected the precious relics of the saints from all parts of Thrace, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Albania, and Greece, where they had business, following the promptings of their piety; sometimes at their own expense, sometimes at the expense of the Republic, rescuing them from barbarism and ignorance.’ Hither, too, when the Infidel overran the South-Sclavonic lands, pious votaries carried for safety what was more precious to them than worldly goods or life itself. Here, in the City of Refuge, are gathered together the penates of the Serbian people. Among the most interesting of these national relics was the silver cross of Czar Dūshan, which is double, like the Hungarian. It is set in front with crystals, and covered with volute filigree work; at the back with vine ornaments. As to St. Blasius, there seemed enough relics of the patron saint of the Republic to make several originals, if pieced together! An Oriental crown enclosing a piece of his cranium, brought hither from the East in the eleventh century, is a master-piece of Byzantine art. Then there is a very choice fragment of John the Baptist’s arm, which was added to the collection in 1452; under, to say the least of it, remarkable circumstances. The Ragusans had taken care of it for a sick Bosniac, who had promised his precious relic to the Florentines. The Bosniac recovered his health; but, as neither Papal thunders nor Tuscan threats availed him to recover the smallest fraction of St. John the Baptist, he turned for help to Bajazet. Bajazet referred the matter to one of his Pashàs, and the Turk, no doubt richly bribed by the Ragusans, cut the matter short by observing to the claimant that if he was in want of Christian bones he might pick up plenty on the field of Kóssovo!

Although as Englishmen we could get up no particular enthusiasm for St. Blaze’s collar bones, the cases were magnificent, and the ancient filigree work of Ragusa particularly struck us. In general appearance the later specimens of the Ragusan silversmith’s art resemble Maltese work, and effloresce into the same flowers and foliage. But the taste for the natural, which followed on the revived study of antiquity, displays itself here still more conspicuously in the development of a kind of silver Palissy-ware by the hands of a great Ragusan master. The most wonderful objects in the Reliquiario are a silver basin and ewer, wrought in the fifteenth century by a Ragusan artist, Giovanni Progonović,[367] in a style so original, that I doubt if anything at all resembling it has even been attempted elsewhere. These are covered with all kinds of shells, creeping things, flowers, and foliage—elegant lizards, not like those that the great potter moulded at his best, but perfectly animate—such as the Neapolitan casts from the living creature. Nay, more, the most perfect mechanism is added to perfect art, and if water be poured into the basin the little creatures move as if they were alive! Everything is enamelled of its natural colour, and though now somewhat diminished in brightness, you have actually to touch the plants and animals to realize that they are not real lizards or fern-leaves preserved in some way. In the vase is a nosegay of silver grasses, each delicate thread, each minutest seed, perfectly reproduced and coloured; among them I recognised a beautiful three-spiked grass that I had noticed growing in the neighbourhood of Ragusa—so true, so indigenous, is this art!

The kindness of Signor Adamović enabled me to see the Reliquiario of the Dominican monastery here. Chief amongst the relics was the silver cross of another Serbian monarch, Stephen Uroš, son of his greater namesake and father of Czar Dūshan, with remains of angular ornamentation, and the following inscription:—[368]

Such is superstition!

There were also many early specimens of filigree work with floral tendencies, and a head—I dare not call it unique—of St. Stephen of Hungary. There was one arm the attribution of which was unknown to the monks, but having succeeded in deciphering a mediæval inscription at the base, I was pleased to be able to inform them that they were the happy possessors of St. Luke’s arm! In the Dominican church and adjoining chapels are many interesting monument of Ragusan citizens, amongst others the tomb of Ghetaldi. There are many family vaults of the Ragusan nobles with Jure hereditario inscribed on them; but one slab inscribed in Italian as ‘the Common Sepulchre of the Confraternity of the Carpenters,’ was peculiarly interesting as a memorial of the guild-brotherhoods of the old Artigiani, which formed such a prominent feature in the early history of the commonwealth.

One may spend days in wandering about Ragusa—exploring her streets, her churches and monasteries, her palaces, and the private houses of her citizens—and always lighting on some interesting memorial of the past. In the meanest houses, in the old walls, in the pavement beneath your feet, you stumble against fragments of sculptured marble—waifs from the wreck of Ragusa as she existed before the earthquake. Of the clean sweep wrought by that terrible calamity, the streets themselves, laid out at right angles, are an eloquent witness; and yet it is surprising how many vestiges of the mediæval city are still to be traced. Not one of the narrow side streets but has its sculptured doorways and mouldings—its ogee window-arches, and luxuriant, half classical, half Gothic foliage. Here and there you pass one of the palaces of the old nobility—the Case Signorili, as they are called—with the family scutcheon carved over the portal, and dignified projecting balconies. So marvellous is this climate that the most beautiful garden and hothouse flowers grow wherever there is a chink in an old wall. In the narrowest alleys the stately shadows of bygone magnificence are lighted up by hanging gardens of scarlet geraniums, golden zinnias, balsams, and fragrant carnations clinging to the crevices of ancient palaces and houses, while here and there a vine-spray joins the opposite sides of the street.

On the landside of the Stradone or high-street the city extends in terraces on the lower flank of the limestone mountain which dominates it. The streets here are prolonged flights of steps, of the usual slippery marble, up which we made our way with difficulty, to obtain a bird’s-eye view of the city from the upper wall. The view was well worth the pains. The whole of Ragusa lay below us, circled on three sides by a sapphire ring of sea. To the north was the fine rock of Fort Lorenzo, whose very foundations saved the infant Commonwealth from the Venetians, and, beneath it, the narrow cove of sea which almost threatens to cut off the land gate of the city. To the south opened the old port of Ragusa, the haven of the Argosies; beyond, rose the gardens and convent of the isle of Lacroma, where Cœur-de-Lion landed, and from whose western precipices malefactors were cast headlong into the sea in the days of the Republic. The colours were simply marvellous—the roofs, the walls, the domes, the campaniles, of the city below, took the rose and orange hues of a ripe apricot; the sea beyond was of the most wondrous ultramarine—and Ragusa with her lofty Oriental walls, rose from its now tranquil bosom like Jerusalem the golden from some crystal sea above. But it is the smallness of Ragusa that strikes one almost more than anything. It seems almost impossible to realize that this little town below should have maintained its independence for centuries amidst surrounding empires; that the wealth of what is now Turkey-in-Europe was once hoarded beneath these closely huddled roofs; that the mightiest carracks of the Spanish navy sailed forth from this petty haven. Ragusa looks the mere plaything of the ocean; and indeed they say that in storms the sea surges up these narrow gorges, and flings its spray right over the cliff-set walls on to the house-tops within, frosting roofs and windows with crystalline brine.

Ragusa is still, as ever, a city of asylum. At the present moment a number of houseless Christian refugees from the Herzegovina have sought shelter here. A colony of these is domiciled outside the Porta Plocce, or sea-gate, in some stable-like buildings which once served as the Lazaretto. On our way there we passed the Turkish market, where a number of Turks were purchasing salt, corn, and fodder for the starving troops of the Sultan in the revolted districts.

The condition in which we found the refugees did great credit to the hospitality of the Ragusans.[369] We had expected to find a set of half-starved miserable wretches, clad in rags and worn with anxiety for absent fathers, husbands, sons. Quite the contrary! They were well fed; they did not seem at all forlorn, and with their light white kerchiefs and chemises they presented a picture of cleanliness which would have put to shame the squalor of many an Italian-Dalmatian. Among the Bosnian refugees of the Save-lands were to be seen many able-bodied men. Here it was far otherwise. The Herzegovinians are made of sterner stuff, and we noticed among the refugees no boys over thirteen, and no men, except one cripple, under seventy, and there were few enough even of these. The women, too, showed something of the spirit of the matrons of old. They had sold their silver trinkets to buy arms for their husbands. Most of them were already stripped of the coins with which they love to bespangle their fez—of the silver brooches of their belt, shaped like two convolvulus leaves—of the broad girdle studded like an ephod with rudely cut carnelians, agates, amethysts, and roots-of-emerald, set like the mediæval gems in the neighbouring Reliquiario. One woman who still possessed this superb ceinture offered it me for twenty gulden—rather less than two pounds. The gems came, she told us, from the Herzegovinian valleys about Nevešinje—she did not know that the agates and carnelians of these prolific sites were exported of old to the sea-ports of Roman Dalmatia, there to be set, as now, in rings and trinkets, and carved with classical devices![370] Attire so neat and graceful needed not, however, the embellishment of barbaric jewellery; the bright crimson fez, the light white kerchief drawn over it and falling about the shoulders in artistic folds, the dark indigo jacket harmonising with the deep reds and oranges of the apron—these were amply sufficient to make the little groups highly picturesque as they sat or leant before their new homes, plying their spindles most industriously. Little children were playing before the women—such frank pleasant faces!—many with hair as fair as ever that of young Angles.

There were about sixty families on this spot, as we found out on distributing a small largess of ten kreutzers a family; and there is another colony of fugitives at Gravosa. The Austrian Government allows each family on an average twenty kreutzers a day, and the commune of Ragusa makes up the amount to thirty-six kreutzers—not more than eightpence of our money, but sufficient to support life out here. To-day (September 3) there is a three days’ truce between the Turks and the insurgents, and a proclamation has been issued by the Turkish governor of the Herzegovina, in which the Pashà promises full indemnity and freedom from molestation to any of the refugees who may consent during this period to return home. Very few, however, have accepted the kind invitation, and for one very good reason—that they have no homes left them to return to.

We were very anxious to secure some memorial of the fugitives; so bringing down the photographer of Ragusa to their colony, we induced the Herzegovinians, by promises of largess, to form a series of groups. As may be easily imagined, there was great difficulty in getting them to keep quiet. The children kept moving about, the women always wanted to set their caps a little differently at the last moment, and one gentleman was very particular about the posture of his wooden leg. However, we succeeded at last, and for a glimpse at the Herzegovinian refugees, as we saw them at Ragusa, I can refer the reader to the frontispiece of this work.

The turbaned figure to the right of the illustration, and the elegant damsel with whom he is walking arm in arm, are not refugees, but peasants from the immediate neighbourhood of Ragusa. The man’s costume, so closely approaching the Turkish, is an interesting example of the influence wrought by the peculiar relations in which, of old, Ragusa stood to the Turks.[371] Nowhere else in Dalmatia does the costume of the peasant so nearly approach that of the true-believer. Here we have not only the same jacket and vest with their gorgeous gold embroidery, the same sash and schalvars, but even a turban on the head; and were it not for his white stockings and a certain preference for crimson jackets, the Ragusan peasant might easily be mistaken for a Moslem. This habit of dress is not confined to the peasants; it is still to be seen among the servants and lower classes in Ragusa itself, and was doubtless originally adopted by the Ragusan merchants to avoid raising the susceptibilities of the infidels with whom they traded, by appearing in the garb of a Giaour. In the seventeenth century, as may be gathered from the relation of an English traveller, the Ragusan merchant who travelled in Turkey in European costume did so at his peril. Blunt, who voyaged himself ‘clad in Turkish manner,’ tells us,[372] in his quaint style, how ‘foure Spahy-Timariots’ met his caravan, ‘where was a Ragusean, a Merchant of quality, who came in at Spalatra to goe for Constantinople, he being clothed in the Italian fashion and spruce, they justled him: He not yet considering how the place had changed his condition, stood upon his termes, till they with their Axes, and iron Maces (the weapon of that country) broke two of his ribs, in which case, we left him behinde, halfe dead, either to get backe as he could, or be devoured of beasts.’

‘If I appeared,’ says Blunt a little farther on, ‘in the least part clothed like a Christian, I was tufted like an Owle among other birds.’

Be pleased to observe the elegant pose of the Ragusan damsel who has condescended to visit these unfortunates arm in arm with our turbaned signior! There is a marked contrast between these refined peasant gentle-folk—these ‘Nostrani,’ as the Ragusans call all those who dwell within the limits of the old Republic—and yonder ‘Morlacchi’—the ruder sons and daughters of the Herzegovinian mountains. Ragusa, even in her days of mourning, has inherited something of her former civilization; a peculiar refinement, both in her peasants and citizens, not to be met with anywhere else throughout these lands, must strike the most unobservant traveller. Not here the rude stare, the pestering beggary, the meanness and mendacity—the painful relics of that barbarous Venetian policy which condemned Dalmatia to perpetual poverty and ignorance. The lion of St. Mark has never weighed like an incubus on Ragusa. It needs to have visited Spalato and other Dalmatian cities to appreciate the extraordinary exception in favour of cleanliness and good manners that presents itself here.

The language here, not counting the German spoken by the Austrian soldiery, is partly Italian and partly Sclavonic, but the bulk of the population speak only Sclavonic. Here you hear the Serbian language at its best; it, too, seems to have felt the influence of the literary Italian which was once the official and scholastic language of the Republic, and falls from the lips of Ragusan citizens with Tuscan elegance and softness. The two elements of which Dubrovnik-Ragusa was originally composed, the Serbian and the Roman, blend to form the typical Ragusan features—now and again separating themselves in all their individuality. In the streets of Ragusa the turquoise eyes of the true Sclave peep out often enough from beneath the raven locks and lashes of the Italian.

Is the time, one asks oneself, to arrive once more when Ragusa shall take up anew the work for which by her very birth she is so eminently fitted—will she once more take her place as the pioneer of South-Sclavonic literature and civilisation? Her ‘gift of tongues,’ her sober industry, her position, still remain. Though the old haven of the Argosies has become too small for the leviathans of modern days, she has at hand in Gravosa the finest harbour on the Dalmatian coast—the nearest port to the point where the Narenta debouches on the sea after cleaving a path through the Dinaric Alps towards the Drina and the commercial basin of the Danube. The old trade route of Ragusan merchants only waits for the demolition of artificial barriers to be opened out anew. Already we hear of the improvement of the navigation of the lower Narenta, and a new steam service is planned between Stagno and Ragusa.

Ragusa is the natural port of the Illyrian interior—the born interpreter between the Italian and Sclave. Those only who have traversed the barbarous lands between the Adriatic and the Save can adequately realise how intimately the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina is bound up with the future of Ragusa. The plodding genius of the Serbs needs to be fanned into energy by these fresh sea-breezes—their imagination languishes for want of this southern sunshine!

Here at last, after groping among the primeval shadows of the mighty beech and pinewoods of the Bosnian midlands, we take our ease in one of the gorgeous rock-girt coves which beautify the environs of Ragusa. Overhead are hanging groves and gardens of rosy oleander, ferny palms, myrtles, and creepers with flame-coloured trumpets. On the steep, a spiry aloe leans forward, stretching towards the south; beneath us the cliffs sink precipitously into the blue-emerald waters—intensified in the deeper pools into a vinous purple—stretching away to the horizon in marvellous ultramarine—on either side of the cove, fretting in a silvery line of foam against walls of orange rock whose natural brilliance is glorified now into refined gold by the setting sun. This is not the light of common day!—it stands to it as some gorgeous mediæval blazoning to a modern chromo-lithograph. It dazzles our dull northern eyes. We are on the borders of another world. We catch an inspiration of the South. The waters of the next sea-bosom lap the ruins of Hellenic Epidaurus.

But the gold on the rocks melts into more sombre browns and greys; the western steeps of the cove lose their outlines in vague shadow; the intense azure of sea and sky dies into a dark sapphire; the plashing of the waves below asserts itself in tones more solemn with the gathering twilight, and the darkness deepens into night.