Eothen, or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East Part 2

This is the struggle which creates the continual occasion for debate.

The vendor, perceiving that the unfolded merchandise has caught the eye of a possible purchaser, commences his opening speech. He covers his bristling broadcloths and his meagre silks with the golden broidery of Oriental praises, and as he talks, along with the slow and graceful waving of his arms, he lifts his undulating periods, upholds and poises them well, till they have gathered their weight and their strength, and then hurls them bodily forward with grave, momentous swing. The possible purchaser listens to the whole speech with deep and serious attention; but when it is over _his_ turn arrives. He elaborately endeavours to show why he ought not to buy the things at a price twenty times larger than their value. Bystanders attracted to the debate take a part in it as independent members; the vendor is heard in reply, and coming down with his price, furnishes the materials for a new debate. Sometimes, however, the dealer, if he is a very pious Mussulman, and sufficiently rich to hold back his ware, will take a more dignified part, maintaining a kind of judicial gravity, and receiving the applicants who come to his stall as if they were rather suitors than customers. He will quietly hear to the end some long speech that concludes with an offer, and will answer it all with the one monosyllable "Yok," which means distinctly "No."

I caught one glimpse of the old heathen world. My habits for studying military subjects had been hardening my heart against poetry; for ever staring at the flames of battle, I had blinded myself to the lesser and finer lights that are shed from the imaginations of men. In my reading at this time I delighted to follow from out of Arabian sands the feet of the armed believers, and to stand in the broad, manifest storm-track of Tartar devastation; and thus, though surrounded at Constantinople by scenes of much interest to the "cla.s.sical scholar," I had cast aside their a.s.sociations like an old Greek grammar, and turned my face to the "s.h.i.+ning Orient," forgetful of old Greece and all the pure wealth she left to this matter-of-fact-ridden world. But it happened to me one day to mount the high grounds overhanging the streets of Pera. I sated my eyes with the pomps of the city and its crowded waters, and then I looked over where Scutari lay half veiled in her mournful cypresses. I looked yet farther and higher, and saw in the heavens a silvery cloud that stood fast and still against the breeze: it was pure and dazzling white, as might be the veil of Cytherea, yet touched with such fire, as though from beneath the loving eyes of an immortal were s.h.i.+ning through and through.

I knew the bearing, but had enormously misjudged its distance and underrated its height, and so it was as a sign and a testimony, almost as a call from the neglected G.o.ds, and now I saw and acknowledged the snowy crown of the Mysian Olympus!

CHAPTER IV-THE TROAD

Methley recovered almost suddenly, and we determined to go through the Troad together.

My comrade was a capital Grecian. It is true that his singular mind so ordered and disposed his cla.s.sic lore as to impress it with something of an original and barbarous character-with an almost Gothic quaintness, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad than to the poetry of h.e.l.las. There was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek-an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian G.o.ds, lugged in under the oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old Norman hall. But Methley, abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good deal of the practical sagacity

"Of a Yorks.h.i.+reman hippodamoio,"

and this enabled him to apply his knowledge with much more tact than is usually shown by people so learned as he.

I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar's love. The most humble and pious among women was yet so proud a mother that she could teach her firstborn son no Watts' hymns, no collects for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood no less than this, to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that old Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek was ingeniously rendered into English, the English of Pope even, but not even a mesh like that can screen an earnest child from the fire of Homer's battles.

I pored over the _Odyssey_ as over a story-book, hoping and fearing for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the Iliad-line by line I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love. As an old woman deeply trustful sits reading her Bible because of the world to come, so, as though it would fit me for the coming strife of this temporal world, I read and read the _Iliad_. Even outwardly, it was not like other books; it was throned in towering folios. There was a preface or dissertation printed in type still more majestic than the rest of the book; this I read, but not till my enthusiasm for the _Iliad_ had already run high.

The writer compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients, set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the _Iliad_ was all in all to the human race-that it was history, poetry, revelation; that the works of men's hands were folly and vanity, and would pa.s.s away like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would endure for ever and ever.

I a.s.sented with all my soul. I read, and still read; I came to know Homer. A learned commentator knows something of the Greeks, in the same sense as an oil-and-colour man may be said to know something of painting; but take an untamed child, and leave him alone for twelve months with any translation of Homer, and he will be nearer by twenty centuries to the spirit of old Greece; _he_ does not stop in the ninth year of the siege to admire this or that group of words; _he_ has no books in his tent, but he shares in vital counsels with the "king of men," and knows the inmost souls of the impending G.o.ds; how profanely he exults over the powers divine when they are taught to dread the prowess of mortals! and most of all, how he rejoices when the G.o.d of War flies howling from the spear of Diomed, and mounts into heaven for safety! Then the beautiful episode of the Sixth Book: the way to feel this is not to go casting about, and learning from pastors and masters how best to admire it. The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pus.h.i.+ng the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their talking; the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy has he for the child that is young enough to be frightened at the nodding plume of a helmet; but all the while that he thus chafes at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the _Iliad_, that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his mother's shawl; yet of this great gain he is unconscious, and on he goes, vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy, and never remitting his fierceness till almost suddenly it is changed for sorrow-the new and generous sorrow that he learns to feel when the n.o.blest of all his foes lies sadly dying at the Scaean gate.

Heroic days are these, but the dark ages of schoolboy life come closing over them. I suppose it is all right in the end, yet, by Jove, at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall from your mother's dressing-room to a buzzing school. You feel so keenly the delights of early knowledge; you form strange mystic friends.h.i.+ps with the mere names of mountains, and seas, and continents, and mighty rivers; you learn the ways of the planets, and transcend their narrow limits, and ask for the end of s.p.a.ce; you vex the electric cylinder till it yields you, for your toy to play with, that subtle fire in which our earth was forged; you know of the nations that have towered high in the world, and the lives of the men who have saved whole empires from oblivion. What more will you ever learn? Yet the dismal change is ordained, and then, thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody), with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore. Instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages, are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch sc.r.a.p of "Scriptores Romani,"-from Greek poetry down, down to the cold rations of "Poetae Graeci," cut up by commentators, and served out by schoolmasters!

It was not the recollection of school nor college learning, but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, which made me bend forward so longingly to the plains of Troy.

Away from our people and our horses, Methley and I went loitering along by the willow banks of a stream that crept in quietness through the low, even plain. There was no stir of weather overhead, no sound of rural labour, no sign of life in the land; but all the earth was dead and still, as though it had lain for thrice a thousand years under the leaden gloom of one unbroken Sabbath.

Softly and sadly the poor, dumb, patient stream went winding and winding along through its s.h.i.+fting pathway; in some places its waters were parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet once more. I could see that the stream from year to year was finding itself new channels, and flowed no longer in its ancient track, but I knew that the springs which fed it were high on Ida-the springs of Simois and Scamander!

It was coldly and thanklessly, and with vacant, unsatisfied eyes that I watched the slow coming and the gliding away of the waters. I tell myself now, as a profane fact, that I did stand by that river (Methley gathered some seeds from the bushes that grew there), but since that I am away from his banks, "divine Scamander" has recovered the proper mystery belonging to him as an unseen deity; a kind of indistinctness, like that which belongs to far antiquity, has spread itself over my memory, of the winding stream that I saw with these very eyes. One's mind regains in absence that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their rude contact. You force yourself hardily into the material presence of a mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your feelings wound up and kept ready for some sort of half-expected rapture are chilled, and borne down for the time under all this load of real earth and water; but let these once pa.s.s out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to mythology.

It is not over the plain before Troy that the river now flows; its waters have edged away far towards the north, since the day that "divine Scamander" (whom the G.o.ds call Xanthus) went down to do battle for Ilion, "with Mars, and Phoebus, and Latona, and Diana glorying in her arrows, and Venus the lover of smiles."

And now, when I was vexed at the migration of Scamander, and the total loss or absorption of poor dear Simois, how happily Methley reminded me that Homer himself had warned us of some such changes! The Greeks in beginning their wall had neglected the hecatombs due to the G.o.ds, and so after the fall of Troy Apollo turned the paths of the rivers that flow from Ida and sent them flooding over the wall, till all the beach was smooth and free from the unhallowed works of the Greeks. It is true I see now, on looking to the pa.s.sage, that Neptune, when the work of destruction was done, turned back the rivers to their ancient ways:

" . . . p?ta??? d' et?efe ?ees?a?

?a?' ???? ?pe? p??s?e? ?e? ?a???????? ?d??,"

but their old channels pa.s.sing through that light pervious soil would have been lost in the nine days' flood, and perhaps the G.o.d, when he willed to bring back the rivers to their ancient beds, may have done his work but ill: it is easier, they say, to destroy than it is to restore.

We took to our horses again, and went southward towards the very plain between Troy and the tents of the Greeks, but we rode by a line at some distance from the sh.o.r.e. Whether it was that the lay of the ground hindered my view towards the sea, or that I was all intent upon Ida, or whether my mind was in vacancy, or whether, as is most like, I had strayed from the Dardan plains all back to gentle England, there is now no knowing, nor caring, but it was not quite suddenly indeed, but rather, as it were, in the swelling and falling of a single wave, that the reality of that very sea-view, which had bounded the sight of the Greeks, now visibly acceded to me, and rolled full in upon my brain. Conceive how deeply that eternal coast-line, that fixed horizon, those island rocks, must have graven their images upon the minds of the Grecian warriors by the time that they had reached the ninth year of the siege!

conceive the strength, and the fanciful beauty, of the speeches with which a whole army of imagining men must have told their weariness, and how the sauntering chiefs must have whelmed that daily, daily scene with their deep Ionian curses!

And now it was that my eyes were greeted with a delightful surprise.

Whilst we were at Constantinople, Methley and I had pored over the map together. We agreed that whatever may have been the exact site of Troy, the Grecian camp must have been nearly opposite to the s.p.a.ce betwixt the islands of Imbros and Tenedos,

"?ess?y?? ?e?ed??? ?a? ???? pa?pa??ess??,"

but Methley reminded me of a pa.s.sage in the _Iliad_ in which Neptune is represented as looking at the scene of action before Ilion from above the island of Samothrace. Now Samothrace, according to the map, appeared to be not only out of all seeing distance from the Troad, but to be entirely shut out from it by the intervening Imbros, which is a larger island, stretching its length right athwart the line of sight from Samothrace to Troy. Piously allowing that the dread Commoter of our globe might have seen all mortal doings, even from the depth of his own cerulean kingdom, I still felt that if a station were to be chosen from which to see the fight, old Homer, so material in his ways of thought, so averse from all haziness and overreaching, would have _meant_ to give the G.o.d for his station some spot within reach of men's eyes from the plains of Troy. I think that this testing of the poet's words by map and compa.s.s may have shaken a little of my faith in the completeness of his knowledge. Well, now I had come; there to the south was Tenedos, and here at my side was Imbros, all right, and according to the map, but aloft over Imbros, aloft in a far-away heaven, was Samothrace, the watch-tower of Neptune!

So Homer had appointed it, and so it was; the map was correct enough, but could not, like Homer, convey _the whole truth_. Thus vain and false are the mere human surmises and doubts which clash with Homeric writ!

n.o.body whose mind had not been reduced to the most deplorable logical condition could look upon this beautiful congruity betwixt the _Iliad_ and the material world and yet bear to suppose that the poet may have learned the features of the coast from mere hearsay; now then, I believed; now I knew that Homer had _pa.s.sed along here_, that this vision of Samothrace over-towering the nearer island was common to him and to me.

After a journey of some few days by the route of Adramiti and Pergamo we reached Smyrna. The letters which Methley here received obliged him to return to England.

CHAPTER V-INFIDEL SMYRNA

Smyrna, or Giaour Izmir, "Infidel Smyrna," as the Mussulmans call it, is the main point of commercial contact betwixt Europe and Asia. You are there surrounded by the people, and the confused customs of many and various nations; you see the fussy European adopting the East, and calming his restlessness with the long Turkish "pipe of tranquillity"; you see Jews offering services, and receiving blows; {8} on one side you have a fellow whose dress and beard would give you a good idea of the true Oriental, if it were not for the _gobe-mouche_ expression of countenance with which he is swallowing an article in the _National_; and there, just by, is a genuine Osmanlee, smoking away with all the majesty of a sultan, but before you have time to admire sufficiently his tranquil dignity, and his soft Asiatic repose, the poor old fellow is ruthlessly "run down" by an English mids.h.i.+pman, who has set sail on a Smyrna hack.

Such are the incongruities of the "infidel city" at ordinary times; but when I was there, our friend Carrigaholt had imported himself and his oddities as an accession to the other and inferior wonders of Smyrna.

I was sitting alone in my room one day at Constantinople, when I heard Methley approaching my door with shouts of laughter and welcome, and presently I recognised that peculiar cry by which our friend Carrigaholt expresses his emotions; he soon explained to us the final causes by which the fates had worked out their wonderful purpose of bringing him to Constantinople. He was always, you know, very fond of sailing, but he had got into such sad sc.r.a.pes (including, I think, a lawsuit) on account of his last yacht, that he took it into his head to have a cruise in a merchant vessel, so he went to Liverpool, and looked through the craft lying ready to sail, till he found a smart schooner that perfectly suited his taste. The destination of the vessel was the last thing he thought of; and when he was told that she was bound for Constantinople, he merely a.s.sented to that as a part of the arrangement to which he had no objection. As soon as the vessel had sailed, the hapless pa.s.senger discovered that his skipper carried on board an enormous wife, with an inquiring mind and an irresistible tendency to impart her opinions. She looked upon her guest as upon a piece of waste intellect that ought to be carefully tilled. She tilled him accordingly. If the dons at Oxford could have seen poor Carrigaholt thus absolutely "attending lectures" in the Bay of Biscay, they would surely have thought him sufficiently punished for all the wrongs he did them whilst he was preparing himself under their care for the other and more boisterous University. The voyage did not last more than six or eight weeks, and the philosophy inflicted on Carrigaholt was not entirely fatal to him; certainly he was somewhat emaciated, and for aught I know, he may have subscribed somewhat too largely to the "Feminine-right-of-reason Society"; but it did not appear that his health had been seriously affected. There was a scheme on foot, it would seem, for taking the pa.s.senger back to England in the same schooner-a scheme, in fact, for keeping him perpetually afloat, and perpetually saturated with arguments; but when Carrigaholt found himself ash.o.r.e, and remembered that the skipperina (who had imprudently remained on board) was not there to enforce her suggestions, he was open to the hints of his servant (a very sharp fellow), who arranged a plan for escaping, and finally brought off his master to Giuseppini's Hotel.

Our friend afterwards went by sea to Smyrna, and there he now was in his glory. He had a good, or at all events a gentleman-like, judgment in matters of taste, and as his great object was to surround himself with all that his fancy could dictate, he lived in a state of perpetual negotiation. He was for ever on the point of purchasing, not only the material productions of the place, but all sorts of such fine ware as "intelligence," "fidelity," and so on. He was most curious, however, as the purchaser of the "affections." Sometimes he would imagine that he had a marital apt.i.tude, and his fancy would sketch a graceful picture, in which he appeared reclining on a divan, with a beautiful Greek woman fondly couched at his feet, and soothing him with the witchery of her guitar. Having satisfied himself with the ideal picture thus created, he would pa.s.s into action; the guitar he would buy instantly, and would give such intimations of his wish to be wedded to a Greek, as could not fail to produce great excitement in the families, of the beautiful Smyrniotes.

Then again (and just in time perhaps to save him from the yoke) his dream would pa.s.s away, and another would come in its stead; he would suddenly feel the yearnings of a father's love, and willing by force of gold to transcend all natural preliminaries, he would issue instructions for the purchase of some dutiful child that could be warranted to love him as a parent. Then at another time he would be convinced that the attachment of menials might satisfy the longings of his affectionate heart, and thereupon he would give orders to his slave-merchant for something in the way of eternal fidelity. You may well imagine that this anxiety of Carrigaholt to purchase not only the scenery, but the many _dramatis personae_ belonging to his dreams, with all their goodness and graces complete, necessarily gave an immense stimulus to the trade and intrigue of Smyrna, and created a demand for human virtues which the moral resources of the place were totally inadequate to supply. Every day after breakfast this lover of the good and the beautiful held a levee, which was often exceedingly amusing. In his anteroom there would be not only the sellers of pipes and slippers and shawls, and such like Oriental merchandise, not only embroiderers and cunning workmen patiently striving to realise his visions of Albanian dresses, not only the servants offering for places, and the slave-dealer tendering his sable ware, but there would be the Greek master, waiting to teach his pupil the grammar of the soft Ionian tongue, in which he was to delight the wife of his imagination, and the music-master, who was to teach him some sweet replies to the antic.i.p.ated sounds of the fancied guitar; and then, above all, and proudly eminent with undisputed preference of _entree_, and fraught with the mysterious tidings on which the realisation of the whole dream might depend, was the mysterious match-maker, {9} enticing and postponing the suitor, yet ever keeping alive in his soul the love of that pictured virtue, whose beauty (unseen by eyes) was half revealed to the imagination.

You would have thought that this practical dreaming must have soon brought Carrigaholt to a bad end, but he was in much less danger than you would suppose; for besides that the new visions of happiness almost always came in time to counteract the fatal completion of the preceding scheme, his high breeding and his delicately sensitive taste almost always came to his aid at times when he was left without any other protection; and the efficacy of these qualities in keeping a man out of harm's way is really immense. In all baseness and imposture there is a coa.r.s.e, vulgar spirit, which, however artfully concealed for a time, must sooner or later show itself in some little circ.u.mstance sufficiently plain to occasion an instant jar upon the minds of those whose taste is lively and true. To such men a shock of this kind, disclosing the _ugliness_ of a cheat, is more effectively convincing than any mere proofs could be.

Thus guarded from isle to isle, and through Greece, and through Albania, this practical Plato with a purse in his hand, carried on his mad chase after the good and the beautiful, and yet returned in safety to his home.

But now, poor fellow! the lowly grave, that is the end of men's romantic hopes, has closed over all his rich fancies, and all his high aspirations; he is utterly married! No more hope, no more change for him-no more relays-he must go on Vetturini-wise to the appointed end of his journey!

Smyrna, I think, may be called the chief town and capital of the Grecian race, against which you will be cautioned so carefully as soon as you touch the Levant. You will say that I ought not to confound as one people the Greeks living under a const.i.tutional government with the unfortunate Rayahs who "groan under the Turkish yoke," but I can't see that political events have hitherto produced any strongly marked difference of character. If I could venture to rely (which I feel that I cannot at all do) upon my own observation, I should tell you that there was more heartiness and strength in the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire than in those of the new kingdom. The truth is, that there is a greater field for commercial enterprise, and even for Greek ambition, under the Ottoman sceptre, than is to be found in the dominions of Otho. Indeed the people, by their frequent migrations from the limits of the const.i.tutional kingdom to the territories of the Porte, seem to show that, on the whole, they prefer "groaning under the Turkish yoke" to the honour of "being the only true source of legitimate power" in their own land.

For myself, I love the race; in spite of all their vices, and even in spite of all their meannesses, I remember the blood that is in them, and still love the Greeks. The Osmanlees are, of course, by nature, by religion, and by politics, the strong foes of the h.e.l.lenic people, and as the Greeks, poor fellows! happen to be a little deficient in some of the virtues which facilitate the transaction of commercial business (such as veracity, fidelity, &c.), it naturally follows that they are highly unpopular with the European merchants. Now these are the persons through whom, either directly or indirectly, is derived the greater part of the information which you gather in the Levant, and therefore you must make up your mind to hear an almost universal and unbroken testimony against the character of the people whose ancestors invented virtue. And strange to say, the Greeks themselves do not attempt to disturb this general unanimity of opinion by an dissent on their part. Question a Greek on the subject, and he will tell you at once that the people are _traditori_, and will then, perhaps, endeavour to shake off his fair share of the imputation by a.s.serting that his father had been dragoman to some foreign emba.s.sy, and that he (the son), therefore, by the law of nations, had ceased to be Greek.

"E dunque no siete traditore?"

"Possibile, signor, ma almeno Io no sono Greco."

Not even the diplomatic representatives of the h.e.l.lenic kingdom are free from the habit of depreciating their brethren. I recollect that at one of the ports in Syria a Greek vessel was rather unfairly kept in quarantine by order of the Board of Health, which consisted entirely of Europeans. A consular agent from the kingdom of Greece had lately hoisted his flag in the town, and the captain of the vessel drew up a remonstrance, which he requested his consul to present to the Board.

"Now, _is_ this reasonable?" said the consul; "is it reasonable that I should place myself in collision with all the princ.i.p.al European gentlemen of the place for the sake of you, a Greek?" The skipper was greatly vexed at the failure of his application, but he scarcely even questioned the justice of the ground which his consul had taken. Well, it happened some time afterwards that I found myself at the same port, having gone thither with the view of embarking for the port of Syra. I was anxious, of course, to elude as carefully as possible the quarantine detentions which threatened me on my arrival, and hearing that the Greek consul had a brother who was a man in authority at Syra, I got myself presented to the former, and took the liberty of asking him to give me such a letter of introduction to his relative at Syra as might possibly have the effect of shortening the term of my quarantine. He acceded to this request with the utmost kindness and courtesy; but when he replied to my thanks by saying that "in serving an Englishman he was doing no more than his strict duty commanded," not even my grat.i.tude could prevent me from calling to mind his treatment of the poor captain who had the misfortune of _not_ being an alien in blood to his consul and appointed protector.

I think that the change which has taken place in the character of the Greeks has been occasioned, in great measure, by the doctrines and practice of their religion. The Greek Church has animated the Muscovite peasant, and inspired him with hopes and ideas which, however humble, are still better than none at all; but the faith, and the forms, and the strange ecclesiastical literature which act so advantageously upon the mere clay of the Russian serf, seem to hang like lead upon the ethereal spirit of the Greek. Never in any part of the world have I seen religious performances so painful to witness as those of the Greeks. The horror, however, with which one shudders at their wors.h.i.+p is attributable, in some measure, to the mere effect of costume. In all the Ottoman dominions, and very frequently too in the kingdom of Otho, the Greeks wear turbans or other head-dresses, and shave their heads, leaving only a rat's-tail at the crown of the head; they of course keep themselves covered within doors as well as abroad, and they never remove their head-gear merely on account of being in a church; but when the Greek stops to wors.h.i.+p at his proper shrine, then, and then only, he always uncovers; and as you see him thus with shaven skull and savage tail depending from his crown, kissing a thing of wood and gla.s.s, and cringing with base prostrations and apparent terror before a miserable picture, you see superst.i.tion in a shape which, outwardly at least, is sadly abject and repulsive.

The fasts, too, of the Greek Church produce an ill effect upon the character of the people, for they are not a mere farce, but are carried to such an extent as to bring about a real mortification of the flesh; the febrile irritation of the frame operating in conjunction with the depression of the spirits occasioned by abstinence, will so far answer the objects of the rite, as to engender some religious excitement, but this is of a morbid and gloomy character, and it seems to be certain, that along with the increase of sanct.i.ty, there comes a fiercer desire for the perpetration of dark crimes. The number of murders committed during Lent is greater, I am told, than at any other time of the year. A man under the influence of a bean dietary (for this is the princ.i.p.al food of the Greeks during their fasts) will be in an apt humour for enriching the shrine of his saint, and pa.s.sing a knife through his next-door neighbour. The moneys deposited upon the shrines are appropriated by priests; the priests are married men, and have families to provide for; they "take the good with the bad," and continue to recommend fasts.

Then, too, the Greek Church enjoins her followers to keep holy such a vast number of saints' days as practically to shorten the lives of the people very materially. I believe that one-third out of the number of days in the year are "kept holy," or rather, _kept stupid_, in honour of the saints; no great portion of the time thus set apart is spent in religious exercises, and the people don't betake themselves to any such animating pastimes as might serve to strengthen the frame, or invigorate the mind, or exalt the taste. On the contrary, the saints' days of the Greeks in Smyrna are pa.s.sed in the same manner as the Sabbaths of well-behaved Protestant housemaids in London-that is to say, in a steady and serious contemplation of street scenery. The men perform this duty _at the doors_ of their houses, the women _at the windows_, which the custom of Greek towns has so decidedly appropriated to them as the proper station of their s.e.x, that a man would be looked upon as utterly effeminate if he ventured to choose that situation for the keeping of the saints' days. I was present one day at a treaty for the hire of some apartments at Smyrna, which was carried on between Carrigaholt and the Greek woman to whom the rooms belonged. Carrigaholt objected that the windows commanded no view of the street. Immediately the brow of the majestic matron was clouded, and with all the scorn of a Spartan mother she coolly asked Carrigaholt, and said, "Art thou a tender damsel that thou wouldst sit and gaze from windows?" The man whom she addressed, however, had not gone to Greece with any intention of placing himself under the laws of Lycurgus, and was not to be diverted from his views by a Spartan rebuke, so he took care to find himself windows after his own heart, and there, I believe, for many a month, he kept the saints' days, and all the days intervening, after the fas.h.i.+on of Grecian women.

Oh! let me be charitable to all who write, and to all who lecture, and to all who preach, since even I, a layman not forced to write at all, can hardly avoid chiming in with some tuneful cant! I have had the heart to talk about the pernicious effects of the Greek holidays, to which I owe some of my most beautiful visions! I will let the words stand, as a humbling proof that I am subject to that immutable law which compels a man with a pen in his hand to be uttering every now and then some sentiment not his own. It seems as though the power of expressing regrets and desires by written symbols were coupled with a condition that the writer should from time to time express the regrets and desires of other people; as though, like a French peasant under the old regime, one were bound to perform a certain amount of work _upon the public highways_. I rebel as stoutly as I can against this horrible, _corvee_.