_AEneid_, x. 782.

Virgil could have put this into the mouth of none but an Argive, and
(with reverence be it spoken) it does not deserve the epithet. And if
the Polynices of Statius, "In mediis audit duo litora campis"
(_Thebaidos_, i. 335), did actually hear both shores in crossing the
isthmus of Corinth, he had better ears than have ever been worn in such
a journey since.

"Athens," says a celebrated topographer, "is still the most polished
city of Greece."[232] Perhaps it may of _Greece_, but not of the
_Greeks_; for Joannina in Epirus is universally allowed, amongst
themselves, to be superior in the wealth, refinement, learning, and
dialect of its inhabitants. The Athenians are remarkable for their
cunning; and the lower orders are not improperly characterised in that
proverb, which classes them with the "Jews of Salonica, and the Turks of
the Negropont."

Among the various foreigners resident in Athens, French, Italians,
Germans, Ragusans, etc., there was never a difference of opinion in
their estimate of the Greek character, though on all other topics they
disputed with great acrimony.

M. Fauvel, the French Consul, who has passed thirty years principally at
Athens, and to whose talents as an artist, and manners as a gentleman,
none who have known him can refuse their testimony, has frequently
declared in my hearing, that the Greeks do not deserve to be
emancipated; reasoning on the grounds of their "national and individual
depravity!" while he forgot that such depravity is to be attributed to
causes which can only be removed by the measure he reprobates.

M. Roque,[233] a French merchant of respectability long settled in
Athens, asserted with the most amusing gravity, "Sir, they are the same
_canaille_ that existed _in the days of Themistocles!_" an alarming
remark to the "Laudator temporis acti." The ancients banished
Themistocles; the moderns cheat Monsieur Roque; thus great men have ever
been treated!

In short, all the Franks who are fixtures, and most of the Englishmen,
Germans, Danes, etc., of passage, came over by degrees to their opinion,
on much the same grounds that a Turk in England would condemn the nation
by wholesale, because he was wronged by his lacquey, and overcharged by
his washerwoman.

Certainly it was not a little staggering when the Sieurs Fauvel and
Lusieri, the two greatest demagogues of the day, who divide between them
the power