OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 465 of iron, which is dug from the adjacent mountains, might have suppHed a braver people with the instruments of defence. The remote position and venerable antiquity of Tingi, or Tangier, have been decorated by the Greek and Arabian fables ; but the figurative expressions of the latter, that the walls were con- structed of brass, and that the roofs were covered with gold and silver, may be interpreted as the emblems of strength and opu- lence. The province of Mauritania Tingitana,^^^ which assumed the name of the capital, had been imperfectly discovered and settled by the Romans ; the five colonies were confined to a narrow pale, and the more southern parts were seldom explored except by the agents of luxury, who searched the forests for ivory and the citron-wood, ^'^'^ and the shores of the ocean for the purple shell-fish. The fearless Akbah plunged into the heart of the country, traversed the wilderness in which his successors erected the splendid capitals of Fez and Morocco,^'^^ and at length penetrated to the verge of the Atlantic and the great desert. The river Sus descends from the western sides of mount Atlas, fertilises, like the Nile, the adjacent soil, and falls into the sea at a moderate distance from the Canary, or Fortu- nate, islands. Its banks were inhabited by the last of the Moors, a race of savages, without laws, or discipline, or religion : they were astonished by the strange and irresistible terrors of the i76Regio ignobilis, et vix quicquam illustre sortita, parvis oppidis habitatur parva flumina emittit, solo quam viris melior et segnitie gentis obscura. Pomponius Mela, i. 5, iii. 10. Mela deserves the more credit, since his own Phoenician ancestors had migrated from Tingitana to Spain (see, in ii. 6, a passage of that geographer so cruelly tortured by Salmasius, Isaac Vossius, and the most virulent of critics, James Gronovius). He lived at the time of the final reduction of that country by the emperor Claudius : yet almost thirty years afterwards Pliny (Hist. Nat. v. i) complains of his authors, too lazy to inquire, too proud to confess their ignorance of that wild and remote province. I'^The foolish fashion of this citron-wood prevailed at Rome among the men, as much as the taste for pearls among the women. A round board or table, four or five feet in diameter, sold for the price of an estate (latifundii taxatione), eight, ten, or twelve thousand pounds sterling (Plin. Hist. Natur. xiii. 29). I conceive that I must not confound the tree citrus with that of the fruit citrum. But I am not botanist enough to define the former (it is like the wild cypress) by the vulgar or Linnaean name ; nor will I decide whether the citrum be the orange or the lemon. Salmasius appears to exhaust the subject, but he too often involves himself in the web of his disorderly erudition (Plinian. E.xercitat. tom ii. p. 666, &c.). i-'^Leo African, fol. 16, verso ; Marmol, tom. ii. o. 28. This province, the first scene of the exploits and greatness of the cherifs, is often mentioned in the curious history of that dynasty at the end of the iiird volume of Marmol, Description de I'Afrique. The iiird volume of the Recherches Historiques sur les Maures (lately published at Paris) illustrates the history and geography of the kingdoms of Fez and Morocco. [It is doubtful whether Okba really reached Tangier and the Atlantic. Weil rejects the story ; vol. i., p. 288.] VOL. V. 30
