But, on the rare days when the sun shines out in all his glory, the landscape has a freshness and a warmth of colouring seldom found in our latitude.

The myrtle loves the soil.

The arbutus thrives better than even on the sunny shore of Calabria, [123] The turf is of livelier hue than elsewhere: the hills glow with a richer purple: the varnish of the holly and ivy is more glossy; and berries of a brighter red peep through foliage of a brighter green.

But during the greater part of the seventeenth century, this paradise was as little known to the civilised world as Spitzbergen or Greenland.

If ever it was mentioned, it was mentioned as a horrible desert, a chaos of bogs, thickets, and precipices, where the she wolf still littered, and where some half naked savages, who could not speak a word of English, made themselves burrows in the mud, and lived on roots and sour milk, [124] At length, in the year 1670, the benevolent and enlightened Sir William Petty determined to form an English settlement in this wild district.
He possessed a large domain there, which has descended to a posterity worthy of such an ancestor.