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DEPARTURE FROM ATHENS.

be liars always; and they are so still, without exception, and on every occasion. For instance, should a stranger be making his way with difficulty to any particular locality in Athens, and should he inquire at the first well-dressed person he may happen to meet, it is ten to one but that he withholds the information, or that he gives a wrong direction. When he has done so he stands still, keeping his eye on the wanderer for a time that he may enjoy the sport of his perplexity. Nay, he will tell what he has done to another, and both will join in the laugh, and think that something very dexterous has been accomplished. I experienced this several times. How different in London, where the poorest and youngest never fail to give distinct information, or to tell you where to inquire. But the Greeks are sober and easily governed; jealous for their native literature, and anxious to restore their language to its native purity.

I had read that the philosophic Julian shed tears when he quitted his beloved Athens. And Hobhouse says that Lord Byron and he could not refrain from looking back as they passed rapidly to the shore, and they continued to direct their eyes towards the spot where they had caught the last glimpse of the Theseum and the ruins of the Parthenon through the vista in the woods, after the Acropolis and the city had been totally hidden from their view. Without yielding one hair's-breadth to any man in my unhounded admiration of the place, I may state that I felt rather in a different humour at the time when leaving Athens, because I was anxious to reach my home. On the day of my departure I rattled merrily down the main street before five o'clock in the morning. The atmosphere was cool, and everything around was dressed in the beaming brightness of the new-born light.

ANOTHER QUARANTINE AT THE PIRÆUS.

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The ruins around were gilded in the gold of the morning, and every green thing seemed fresh from the repose and dews of the night. I was elevated at the notion that I had seen everything in Greece my plan and time had admitted; and also that this other voyage was to carry me to Malta and out of the Levant. After a sound sleep, and in the circumstances, there was a mechanical elasticity in all my faculties, mixed with a little dash of pride that I was not now to be accounted a mere barn-door traveller. In going down to the sea, even at a canter, I traced the track of the wall built by Themistocles still more accurately than I had done before, and as I came to the last height which was to shut out Athens from my view, never more to be seen, I admired, I had almost said adored, the antiquities of the place. I called a halt, and paused and pondered till I at length turned my eyes towards the bay of Salamis, and there I saw the steamer which would take me to Malta doubling the promontory and sending forth a vigorous column of black smoke trailing far behind it. And with a sneer I remarked to myself, that for the practical object which I had now in hand this steamer was really a very sublime and beautiful sight. But at the Piræus I was again put into quarantine as I had been at Syra, and so there was an end to all my romantic conceptions.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE LAND OF THE POPE.

I LEFT the port of Athens about ten o'clock in the evening. My feelings were of a painful and almost oppressive character, when I looked around for the last time on the beautiful but still and melancholy aspect of the once busy and glorious shores around. I thought of Byron's beautiful lines, so original and descriptive:

"He who hath bent him o'er the dead
Ere the first day of death is fled,

The first dark day of nothingness,

The last of danger and distress,

(Before Decay's effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,)

And mark'd the mild angelic air,

The rapture of repose that's there,

The fix'd yet tender traits that streak

The languor of the placid cheek,
And-but for that sad shrouded eye,

That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now,
And but for that chill, changeless brow,
Where cold Obstruction's apathy

Appals the gazing mourner's heart,

As if to him it could impart

The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon;

Yes, but for these and these alone,
Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant's power;

LAST LOOK OF GREECE.

So fair, so calm, so softly seal'd,

The first, last look by death reveal'd!

Such is the aspect of this shore;

"Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!

So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,

We start, for soul is wanting there.
Hers is the loveliness in death,

That parts not quite with parting breath;

But beauty with that fearful bloom,
That hue which haunts it to the tomb,
Expression's last receding ray,

A gilded halo hovering round decay,

The farewell beam of Feeling past away!

Spark of that flame, perchance of heavenly birth,
Which gleams, but warms no more its cherish'd earth!

Clime of the unforgotten brave!
Whose land from plain to mountain-cave
Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave!
.Shrine of the mighty! can it be,

That this is all remains of thee?"

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Never did a brighter moon shine with more splendour in a clear cloudless sky of the purest blue. As there is not a more beautiful sight in the whole seas, morning-ward of Malta, than the setting sun, so there is not in the Mediterranean sea a finer sight than the rising moon, when in the full, as she happened to be on this occasion. Oh with what a might and majesty she calmly traversed the canopy of the sky, leaving only a few stars of the first magnitude to tell by their diminished light, that the north and the south could still be distinctly told! It was my delight to recognise the luminaries I had so often seen at home, and to take my bearings the best way I could so as to satisfy myself where my country lay from me. Far and wide, all around in the bay, with its white sand, and on barks with their white sails, did this beautiful picture of calm repose sleep in death, at the side of islands darker than the rippling wave, and mountains

472

THE FRENCH AND RUSSIAN SQUADRON.

sterner in their aspect than the glittering white foam which danced and gently dashed around them.

"Pronounce what sea, what shore is this?

The gulf, the rock, of Salamis."

Thus the present state of Greece compared to the ancient is the silent obscurity of the grave contrasted with the vivid lustre of active life.

Politically speaking, there are some curious works going on in the Levant in a small way. I saw at the Piræus the French Admiral's flag-ship, and some other insignificant French-Russian craft, presenting to the mind of the timid something like the ghost of a combined squadron. I however almost imagined that I saw the queen from Malta, as if vomiting forth the contents of her hundred and twenty sixtyeight pounders, with the liberality of British sailors on such occasions, and lowering every one of their flags in one hour's time. But I was told at table, that this said French Admiral's flag-ship had, in the course of the late war, taken two English seventy-four gun ships. Some plain but puzzling queries were put as to names, dates, and places, when a rattling English youth, aged only about twenty years, roared out, that he remembered the event most distinctly, and that it happened in the vicinity of Brussels on the 18th of June, 1815, and about seven o'clock in the evening. Monsieur bit his lip, and said that the Toulon fleet had been ordered to sea for the purpose of observing the movements of the English squadron in the Mediterranean; and he added, with a very bitter grimace, that in three years Malta would belong to the Russians, and that in twenty years more the French would acquire it from both of these nations of Eng