not a city of Greeks at all in the true sense. Perhaps not ethnologically: no doubt the race has got a little mixed; but the Athens of today seems to me to bear a marvellous resemblance in its crowds and their manners to the Athens of Aristophanes and of St. Paul. One understands Aristophanes better after half an hour's observation of the street of Hermes or the old market-place just under the Acropolis. Nearly half the street-population—the working, trading, donkey-driving, wood-chopping, load-carrying population—are Albanians. The fustanella, or white kilt, of the traditional Albanian is as common in the streets of Athens as the private soldier's uniform in London. The servants and attendants of the royal household are always especially gorgeous in their Albanian garb. Their vast white kilts rustle with conscious grandeur, like the tartans of Vich-ian-Vohr in Waverley. Many of these heroes swagger about with belts that contain a whole armory of knives and pistols. Some of them wear shoes that turn up at the toes like those of a mediæval gallant, with the difference that the point of the toe is here adorned by a curious round ornament looking like a prickly pear or the bristly clump of an old-fashioned shaving-brush. The Albanian women of the poorer class are oddly got up. They generally wear a thick and gaudy shawl wrapped round head and shoulders, and from the shoulders down seem to be clad in nothing but a long white chemise. Not many women are in the streets. Athenian ladies seldom go out; Athenian maid-servants do not run on errands. Epirotes are everywhere, in great baggy trousers the waste of material in which appears quite as extravagant as that of the white stuff in the fustanella. Shepherds from the mountains are there in shaggy capotes. Greek priests with mild deep eyes and long dark beards are everywhere, wearing gracefully their flowing robes and their high peculiar hats. Strings of donkeys bear along enormous piles of brushwood, every stack of brushwood covering each animal much more completely than Malcolm's soldiers could have been covered by Dunsinane boughs. Extemporaneous market-places are started from moment to moment at any convenient juncture of streets or open space. Everywhere traffic, talk, chatter, bustle, variety of costume, color and figure; no beggars or beggary anywhere. The two great business streets of Athens are the street of Hermes and the street of Eolus; these run across each other. The street of Hermes begins in the square of the Constitution and passes through the centre of the city out into the suburbs and the fields. About midway in its course it is crossed by the street of Eolus, which, starting from the foot of the Acropolis and passing the temple of Eolus, or Tower of the Winds, goes on until it touches the corner of the Place of Concord, a new square of the approved Parisian pattern. These are the principal business streets. Then there is the fashionable street of the Stadion, where people make a promenade of evenings, and University Street with its glittering and many-colored buildings; and there are streets of costly and luxurious private residences where the Greek or the Levantine who has made money settles himself down to display his splendor in his villa. Looking one way from the street of Hermes is seen the Acropolis; looking the other way, the steep and conical Lycabettus, with the little monastery or hermitage on its top, the light in which is supposed-I only say "supposed '-never and then to a gate at the top of a little flight to be allowed to go out. Who lingers long in the streets of Athens before he has climbed the Acropolis and seen the Parthenon? We soon left the houses and made for the sacred hill. We went the long way, past the street which bears the name of Byron, and past the amphitheatre on some of whose marble benches you may still read the names of their once lucky possessors; and we mounted up by dusty roads made picturesque with the frequent cactus and thyme, and even still some stray flowers, until we reached the Hill of Mars, on which Paul preached; and we stopped every now and then to gaze upon the exquisite outlines of the Parnes range of mountains, or of Hymettus, much nearer to us. On the way I showed Steenie a long deep rut of stones and shards and pebbles and old scraps of broken crockery and bottles and shreds of paper, and I informed him that that was the Ilyssus, and that if we should have any heavy rain we might see water there some day. Every now and then we caught a glimpse of the sea and of rocky Sunium and the shores of Salamis. Always as we ascend we have rising above us the Acropolis with its sublimely ordered confusion of pillars, that change color every moment as we change our point of view. Now they are of a rich glowing orange and now turn to purple, and again gleam white and sparkling, and yet with another winding of the hill stand out like ebony against some mass of light clouds floating lazily along the sky. A few sellers of curiosities waylay us as we mount, but they are not importunate; they are not like the pestering nuisances of Switzerland or Italy. We get to a belt of wall, of rugged stone steps-mere stones piled on stones; and when we knock, the door is opened to us by one of the old soldiers who are the guardians of the place. We are within the precincts of the Parthenon. The old soldier will accompany us if we wish it, and he will answer any question we please to put. But he does not insist on being our guide. As we do not ask him to come with us, he quietly falls behind. He does, indeed, follow us at some little distance, with his grayblue cloak wrapped round him; and he keeps his eye on us, for he does not know us, and visitors have even still a way of carving their name on some exquisite sculptured fragment of marble or chipping off a piece as a memento of the Parthenon or the Erechtheum. But when he comes to know us and to see that we have no such purpose, but that we honestly admire and reverence the ruins on the grass-grown Acropolis, he will cease to follow or to watch us. To make its charms perfection for the stranger, the Parthenon only wanted this happy freedom from the pestering of the professional guide. For the Parthenon is perfection. Every pile that human hands have raised is, for beauty and symmetry, an anti-climax after the Parthenon. Who could describe the divine shapeliness and dignity of those colonnades of ineffable design? Vaster, and in a sense grander, are the awful ruins at Karnak, nak, but they oppress the very soul of the gazer by their stupendous vastness; they do not fill and satisfy him with a sense of perfect form and beauty as the Parthenon does. Those Doric columns, whose successive colorings have now settled down to a softened orange hue-do they not seem the very em bodiment of strength and grace, each one a poet's thought turned into marble? For hours one wanders lost in wonder through this wilderness of ruined temples, and rows of stately erect columns, and fallen statues, and slender broken shafts, and marble steps, and thrones, and fonts. I have called it a I have called it a wilderness, but the word will not suit, for the very divineness of order and harmony is in these ruins. Every prostrate column seems to have fallen with the dignity of the dying Cæsar. Then look around; turn your eyes a moment from the temples and the columns to the scene beyond, and say whether earth would have anything to show more fair, even though there never had been a Parthenon and the Acropolis were a naked rock. See! There, where the sea is glittering on your left, is the island of Salamis, and leftward farther still is Sunium. Through the clefts and gorges of that glorious mountainrange in front one can sometimes see, on a clear day and nearly all days are clear in this region the ruin-crowned head of far Acrocorinth. Not much vegetation, even on Hymettus, but a beauty of outline, given by Nature, as exquisite as that which Art has conferred on the Parthenon itself; and where there is color it is color rich and yet tender, on mountain-side, on marble, as on the sea and in the heaven. Nor is that part of the Acropolis the least interesting where you can sit or lean upon a low wall or battlement and see Athens shining beneath you. There, spread out at your feet like a colored map, is the whole city. You can trace every street; you can discover almost any house you happen to know. There is the king's palace-any one can see that at a glance with its great gardens and the square of the Constitution in front. There stretches the street of Hermes; see where it is crossed by the street of Eolus. Beneath, in the valley, is the temple of Theseus; one can hardly speak of it as a ruin it is still almost untouched by time. Not far is the Athenian terminus of the one Greek railway, the line from the city to Phaleron and the Piræus; we can see the little train come puffing and steaming in. In this marvellously still and clear air every sound from the city comes up to our ears softened but distinct. The cries of the eager sellers in the market, the wail of a child, the barking of a dog, the sound of a mule's bell,-all come clearly up to the heights of the Acropolis. If you turn this way, you see at the foot of Hymettus a burial-ground with its cypresses; and a funeral procession is going in, the corpse lying in the yet open coffin, adorned in all its gala-clothes and with hands meekly composed upon its breast. Here and there you see what was once a Turkish mosque, with its peculiar round and cap-like roof; it is perhaps now an Athenian schoolhouse. Turn again to where the city lies, and look across and over it until your view is broken by the steep and the hermitage of Lycabettus the Lycabettus of Eschylus and of Aristophanes. All this I pointed out as well as I could to Steenie. Needless to say that I did not indulge in any raptures, or even any enthusiasm, to him. It is almost an unlucky thing for a man to be really in love with the Parthenon as I am, for it seems so like affectation—so like going into rapture where rapture is the conventional thing. I have a friend who says is a positive trouble to him that he cannot help admiring Shakespeare beyond all other it my poets. If any foolish person-some girl, perhaps asks him what poet he most admires, and he has to answer "Shakespeare," how can she help thinking that he is only saying he admires Shakespeare because everybody ought to admire Shakespeare? I try to keep admiration for the Parthenon well in order. I have even once, when asked for my opinion by a young lady, had art enough to say that on the whole I thought the Parthenon very nice. I was rewarded for this judicious selfrestraint by obtaining from her a frank and honest reply. She said she didn't care about it much. I mentioned this little fact to Steenie, and he was pleased. I brought our visit to the Parthenon to an end. Steenie, indeed, was ready to go at any time. He said nothing in particular disparagement of the place, but he observed that, after all, there was not a great deal for him to see there, inasmuch as all the finest things the Acropolis had ever had were now in the British Museum. "You see everything best at the British Museum, don't you know," Steenie observed as we passed the temple of the Wingless Victory and came down the marble steps of the Propylæa together. |