What is the common point of connexion between all the lands and places which bear the name of Alba, Albania, or something like it? They lie so far apart, they are inhabited by people of such utterly different nations and languages, that it is strange if there be any point of connexion among them, while it is at least as strange if the name has settled down on so many remote spots by sheer accident only. We must not forget that our own land has an interest in the question: we dwell in the Isle of Albion, and its northern part is specially Albanach or Albany. An English lady living on the eastern shore of the Hadriatic was lately complimented by a Scotch lady because, being an Albanian, she spoke such good English. It was afterwards suggested to her that she might have answered with a _tu quoque_ or something more; the Englishwoman was no Albanian; the Scotchwoman in a certain sense was. But have Albanians of either of these kinds anything to do either with the Duke of Al_v_a--for in his tongue "non aliud est _v_i_v_ere quam _b_i_b_ere"--or with the Albania beyond the Euxine? Then again it is singular to read, say in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, the local wars of Rome and Alba Longa described under exactly the same gentile names as those by which Imperial Anna describes strife between the New Rome and those Ghegs and Tosks who have again begun to make themselves famous. It is [Greek: Rhômaioi] and [Greek: Albanoi] in both cases, without the change of jot or tittle. In this case, at least, we believe that philologers would deny the slightest kindred between the names; but the casual identity is thereby only made the more startling. A malicious critic might say that Anna's Romans were as unlike old Romans as her Albanians could be unlike the men of Alba Longa. But her Romans did at least claim to be Romans, sharers in the inheritance of the wolf and the eagle; while her Albanians certainly laid no claims to any rights in the Alban sow and her thirty pigs.
Rome, undutiful daughter, swept away her mother city so thoroughly that its site has become a matter of dispute. But the name lived on in derivative forms. Alba perished, but the Alban lake and the Alban mount kept their places, to play no small part in the history of Rome. There is the lake, there is the great drain for its waters, so strangely interwoven with the tale of Veii. There is the mount, with the road by which the chariot of Marcellus went up in triumph; there are still the displaced stones of the temple which was the religious centre of the Latin name. But for the fanaticism of the last Stewart, the pillared front of the Latin Jupiter might still form the proudest of crowns for the height on which the gazer from the walls of Rome fixes his eye more commonly than on any other. And, if Alba perished, she did in a manner rise again. The neighbourhood of dead Alba became as favourite a quarter for the villas of Roman nobles as the neighbourhood of living Tusculum. There the great Pompeius had a dwelling; there, according to one version of his story, his body--or perhaps only his head--found a stately tomb, though Hadrian could make his verse by the Alexandrian Shore to say that no tomb had been found for him who had so many temples. But of all villas on Alban ground, of all _Albana_, the _Albanum_ of the Emperors, with its spacious gardens, its long terraces still to be traced, of course came to be the greatest. The walled station of the Imperial guards, the fellow of the Prætorian camp at Rome, became the kernel of a new town, and Albano still exists, an episcopal city, seat of a cardinal-bishop, and it still keeps its character as a summer retreat for those who, now as of old, seek to escape the smoke and wealth and noise of lordly Rome. Albano and Alba stand in somewhat the same relation as Spalato and Salona. In both cases the new city grew out of an Imperial dwelling-place in the neighborhood of the old. But there is this wide difference between them, that Alba has utterly perished, while Salona survives in ample ruins. Alba had vanished ages and ages before Albano arose. Spalato stood ready to be a city of refuge for those who fled from Salona in her day of overthrow.