TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
--Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
THE
MODERN ATHENS:
A DISSECTION AND DEMONSTRATION
OF MEN AND THINGS
IN
THE SCOTCH CAPITAL.
BY A MODERN GREEK.
_Ανδϱες Αϑηναῖοι, ϰατὰ ϖάντα ὡς δεισιδαιμονεστέϱους
ὑμᾶς ϑεωϱῶ._
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR KNIGHT AND LACEY,
PATERNOSTER ROW.
MDCCCXXV.
LONDON:
Printed by WILLIAM CLOWES,
Northumberland-court.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
The Author and the King set out for the Athens--The
Author arrives--The Gathering--Corporation-men--Glasgow,
Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee, &c.--The People page 1.
CHAPTER II.
Athenian Preparations for Majesty--Official Men--Royal
Society--Plan by the Ultras--Migration of the
Jews--Exercise of the Athenian Fair--Sir Walter
Scott--Storm at Sea--Anxiety in the Athens--Royal
Squadron arrives--Fresh anxiety p. 19.
CHAPTER III.
The King lands--Grandeur of the Scenery--Joy of
the People--Insult to Leith--Illuminations--The
Levee--The Court--Disappointment of
Official Men--The Athenian Ladies--Royal
Salutation--Dances--Pilgrimages--Dinners--Kirks--Vanity
of the Athens--National
Monument--Dispersion--Farewell p. 41.
CHAPTER IV.
The
Athens--Situation--Architecture--Environs--Self-idolatry
--Widowed State--Sundry Theories p. 149.
CHAPTER V.
Political State of Scotland--Counties--Burghs--The
Athens--Criminal Law--Lord Advocate--Athenian
Tories--Whigs p. 167.
CHAPTER VI.
Athenian Lawyers--Their overwhelming Influence--Their
Habits and Characters--Solemnity of the Scotch Criminal
Courts p. 187.
CHAPTER VII.
Athenian Learning--Causes of its
Decline--Professors--Philosophers--University--Patronage
--Athenian Parsons p. 206.
CHAPTER VIII.
Literature--Ramsay--Ferguson--Burns--The
Edinburgh Review--Blackwood’s Magazine--The
Scot’s Magazine--Miserable State of the Athenian
Press--Causes p. 225.
CHAPTER IX.
Education--Scotch Education generally--Its
Advantages--The Athenian Populace--Athenian
Education--Its doubtful Qualities p. 258.
CHAPTER X.
Athenian Manners--Religion p. 290.
CHAPTER XI.
Sundry Qualities in Supplement p. 305.
Throughout the Volume, there will be found _attic_ touches of real
character, in illustration of the general and local truths.
THE
MODERN ATHENS.
CHAPTER I.
THE AUTHOR AND THE KING ARE INDUCED TO VISIT THE MODERN ATHENS.
“Ego et Rex meus.”--WOLSEY.
The renown of the Scottish Metropolis,--that city of wonders and of
wisdom, of palaces and of philosophy, of learned men and of lovely
women, had sounded so long and so loudly in their ears, that toward
the close of summer 1822, the Author of these pages and the Sovereign
of these realms, were induced to pay it a visit, each in that state
and with that pomp and circumstance which was becoming his station in
the world. The one, in that unmarked guise which is fitting for one
who lives more for the glory of others than of himself, and who sets
more value upon the single sentence which preserves his memory when he
is no more, than upon all that he can possess or enjoy in this world.
The other, in that glow and grandeur, which gains in intensity what
it stands some chance of losing in duration,--which is the grand idol
of its day; and which, when that day has closed, is gathered to the
sepulchre of its fathers, to make room for another--and the same.
The Author of these pages must not be blamed, or deemed disloyal, for
having given his own name the precedence of that of his Sovereign.
Every man in reality prefers himself before all the sovereigns in
the world; and wherefore should not one man state this preference in
words? The courtier declares that all his services are devoted to his
king,--but he devotes them no longer than that king can afford to
pay for them: the soldier swears that he will die in defence of the
crown,--but he never dies till he is compelled by the superior strength
or skill of another. Even upon general grounds, therefore, there is
candour if not courtesy in this order of precedence.
But, when the specialities of the case are considered,--when it is
borne in mind that the monarch, all-gracious and polite as he is,
visited the Athens, as well to dazzle the Athenians by his grandeur,
as to delight them by his bounty,--that the native luminaries of that
centre of many twinkling lights were shorn of their beams by his
overwhelming radiance,--that this instance of kingly condescension
taught the ΔΕΜΟΣ of Athena to regard as haply something less even than
men, those whom they had formerly looked upon as possessing some of
the attributes of divinity; and when, on the other hand, it is taken
into the account that the author of these pages made his visit solely
with a view of seeing with his own eyes, hearing with his own ears, and
proclaiming with his own lips, the truth of those reports which had
come to him through so many channels, and of which the fruition had
proved so much more delectable than the foretaste: then, assuredly,
ought Athena herself, from all the castles of her strength, the halls
of her wisdom, the drawing-rooms of her beauty, and the alleys of her
retirement, to confess that she owes to the author of these pages more
than kingly gratitude.--The King noticed but a few of her people,
enriched not many, and ennobled almost none: those pages are intended
to enwrap the whole in one pure and perennial blaze of glory.
It was on the evening of the same day that the Monarch took shipping
at Greenwich amid the shouts of assembled multitudes, and the Author
took his seat on the top of the Edinburgh mail, amid piles of tailors’
boxes, each containing a courtier’s habit, in which some fond, and
fawning, and fortune-desiring son of Caledonia was to bend the supple
knee in the presence of Majesty, within the ancient palace of the
Holyrood. The voyages of kings, and the velocity of mail-coaches, are
already known and appreciated; and thus there needs no more to be said,
than that here also the Author had by several days the precedence of
the King.
The jolting of the wooden cases of my courtly neighbours, together
with forty-eight hours’ exposure to drought by day and damp by night,
prepared me, in spite of all my burning anxiety to see the far-famed
city, for the enjoyment of several hours of repose; and, as Athena was
at this time too much excited for permitting me to enjoy this till
towards morning, the sun had risen high before I left my chamber.
Upon hurrying into the street,--into that Princes’ street, which, as
I afterwards learned, is at certain seasons of the year the favourite
lounge of the Athenian dandies, and at certain hours of the day the
favourite haunt of the Athenian fair, who resort thither as the
clock strikes four, to feast their fair and anxious eyes upon the
self-important forms of dashing advocates, the more dapper and pursey
ones of pawkie writers to his Majesty’s signet, or the attenuated
striplings of the quill--the future Clerks and Jefferys, who at that
hour are returning from the harvest of law and profits to such feast
as awaits them in ample hall or elevated cock-loft, according to their
talents, their connexions, or their purses;--upon hurrying into that
street, in the expectation of feasting my eyes upon the natural and
architectural glories of the city, I found that those glories were in
the mean time veiled in the maddening preparations of a whole people,
who had come from every portion of the main land, and from the remotest
isle of Thulè, to wonder at and to admire that mightiest marvel of
human nature--a king.
So novel and so varied were the costumes, so unexpected and so
singular were the features and expressions, and so uncouth and
Babylonish were the voices, that the eye and the ear were confounded,
the judgment could not understand, and the memory could preserve no
record. Here you might see some brawny and briefless barrister--the
younger son of a loyal family, with a pedigree at least twice as
long as its rental, with trowsers and jacket _à la_ Robin Hood,
and huge blue bonnet adorned with the St. Andrew’s cross and a
turkey-cock’s feather--looking for all the world like a chimney-sweep’s
Jack-o’-the-Green, or a calf dressed entire and garnished with
cabbage-leaves; while close by him trotted a loyal toast-composing
crown-lawyer, with his hinder end cased in a phillibeg, a feathered
bonnet, at least a third of his own height, an iron-hilted sword
somewhat more than the whole, and a dirk that might have served for
a plough-share, puffing and blowing under the weight of his own
importance, and the accoutrements of the Celtic society. In close
juxtaposition with these was a genuine _Glhuine dhu_, plaided, plumed,
and whiskered, and looking as if all the kings of the earth were
nothing to that swaggering chieftain, of whose _tail_ he formed no
inconsiderable portion. In another place you could catch the broad
face and broader bonnet of a lowland farmer of the old school, cased
in one uniform garb of home-made blue, with brass buckles to his
shoes, a brass key suspended to his watch by a tough thong of black
leather, greasy enough,--holding solemn colloquy with that reverend
member of the Scottish Kirk, to whom he acted in the capacity of ruling
elder, about the danger of compromising the interests of the Whig or
_high-flying_ part of that establishment, during the _avatar_ of so
many Tories. The reverend gentleman himself was no bad sight. His
general-assembly coat and et cetera’s were duly kept at home,--that
is to say, in his two-shillings-a-week apartments, up seven pair
of stairs, in College-street, or haply in the house of that town
acquaintance with whom he had found cheaper board,--till the eventful
days should arrive. Thus he was habited in his parson’s grey, the
breast of which, where it projected beyond the perpendicular, bore
testimony to the fall, both of broth and of punch, while his inferior
regions were shaded and shielded by dark-olive velveteens, a little
tarnished, worsted hose furrowed as neatly as the turnip-division of
his glebe, and cow-skin shoes of the most damp-defying power, which
borrowed no part of their lustre from Mr. Robert Warren. Still the good
man was clean in his linen; his chin was shorn like a new-mowed field;
his visage beamed forth gratitude for “a competent portion of the good
things of this life;” and his plump and ruddy hands slumbered with
much orthodox ease in the capacious pockets of the velveteens. Anon, a
highland laird, whose _tail_ comprised only his lady and half a dozen
of daughters, and who seemed to be meditating upon the roofless castle
and ill-stored larder, to which the expense of parading full thirty-six
feet of female charms before the King would subject him, during the
weary moons of the Highland winter, hurried past, not at all at his
ease.
But, to describe the individuals, strongly marked as they were,
would be altogether out of the question; and, indeed, to give any
thing like even a sketch of the groups and classes and knots of men,
women, and children, in all habits, of all ages, and in almost every
variety of shape, would bankrupt even a German vocabulary, although
in that language one be allowed, for clearness sake, to lump a score
of sentences into a single epithet. The cry was still “they come,”
and Caledonia, from fertile plain and far mountain,--from toiling
city and tiresome wilderness,--from rock, and glen, and river,--upon
the wings of the wind, urged on by steam, drawn in coach, chaise,
waggon, cart, and hurdle, riding upon horses, mules, and donkeys, and
running upon feet, shod and unshod,--came scudding and smoking, and
creaking and crashing, and reeking and panting, in one conglomerating
cloud, and one commingling din, to distract the attention from the
attic glories of Edinburgh, and for a time drown her classic sounds
in the discordant and untunable din of all the provinces. Here you
had the broad shoulders and bold bearing of the borderer, delving an
elbow, of the size and substance of a sirloin of beef, into the skinny
ribs of an Aberdonian professor of humanity, who all the time kept
squeaking like a sick fiddle, in response to the bellow of the other,
which reminded you of a bull confined in the vaulted hall of an old
castle. There grinned the fat face of an East Lothian farmer, between
a Perth baillie on the one hand, and a Stonehaven scribe on the other,
like a ram’s tail between the blades of a shepherd’s sheers. And,
yonder gaped and wondered the great face of a Glasgow negro-driver,
like a Gorgon’s head--not upon the shield of Minerva. Still there was
something interesting in the mighty and motley throng: it put one in
mind of Noah’s ark, which contained “clean beasts, and beasts that are
not clean, and fowls, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
The most delectable part of the gathering was the combined clans and
the burgh corporations. The former belted like warriors and bellied
like weasels, and tricked out for the occasion in their respective
tartans of their names, each bearing a sprig of the symbolic tree in
his bonnet, a huge claymore in the one hand, and a relay of brogues
and stockings in the other, with a great horn snuff-mull thrust into
his _sporran_--open and ready for action--hurried along at the _pas
de charge_ to their headquarters for the time-being, where they were
instantly dispersed into the crowd, thence to reassemble when the
bagpipe should frighten the last shadow of night.
The corporation-men came in less military but more important guise.
Glasgow, the queen of the west, Aberdeen, the glory of the north,
Dundee and Perth, the rival empresses of the centre, with Cupar-Fife,
Crail, and a hundred others, each charged with a loyal and dutiful
address, which had been composed by the town-clerk, revised in the
spelling by the schoolmaster, and was to be discharged at the King,
in a manner so powerful and point-blank, as to procure knighthood if
not earldom for such candle-selling provost, breeches-manufacturing
baillie, or other chief magistrate “after his kind,” came on with a
splendour and an importance that Scotland never before witnessed.
Glasgow, as became her purse and her pride, came blazing like the
western star--or rather like a comet whose tail would have girdled half
the signs of the zodiac. The van was led by the magistrates, in a coach
which previously knew every street and lane of the city, but which was
relackered for the occasion, had the city arms emblazoned upon it as
large as a pullicate handkerchief, and was drawn by eight grey horses
of the genuine Lanarkshire breed,--the thunder of whose feet as they
dashed along shook the kirk of Shotts, and had nearly laid Airdrie and
Bathgate in ruins. The clatter which they made along Princes’ Street
was astounding; the crowd collected in thousands at the din; some
cried it was the king himself; but the final opinion was, that it was
“naebody but the magestrates o’ Glasgow.”
In the train of this goodly leading, there followed full fifty
thousand,--or to speak by measure, as number was quite out of the
question, full forty-four miles of merchants and makers of muslin; and
the vehicles which carried the car-borne part of them were more strange
and varied than ever appeared at the triumph of a Roman emperor upon
his return from smiting the barbarous nations, and carrying themselves
and all their utensils captive. Here you would see the equipage of a
rich dealer in turmeric or tobacco, fashionable enough except in its
contents; there you were presented with a Glasgow _Noddy_, squeezing
forward its lank form like a tile, and dragged by a steed with three
serviceable legs, and one eye the worse for the wear; in another place
you would meet with a hearse, with a tarpaulin over it to hide the
death’s head and the bones, and crammed full of the saints of the
Salt-market laid lengthways for the convenience of stowage; while the
rear was brought up by an enormous tilted waggon, which, though it was
at first conjectured to contain Polito’s collection of wild beasts,
was, upon examination, found to be charged very abundantly with that
more important and polished matter--the ladies and gentlemen of Paisley
and Greenock.
The pride of the north had been more than usually upon the _qui vive_.
The Provost had been attitudenizing before a great mirror for a week,
and getting his pronunciation translated into English by Mr. Megget,
of the Academy, for at least a fortnight; the town-clerk had been
drudging at “steps” in private with Mr. Corbyn for a month, and the
learned Mr. Innes had been applied to, to cast the nativity of the
city; and, from the horoscope--Saturn in conjunction with Mars, and
Venus lady of the ascendant, it was sagely inferred by the clubbed
wisdoms of King’s and Mareschal that the Provost “wad get a gryte
mickle purse o’ siller, for the gueed o’ the ceety, forby a triffle to
himsel’;” and that, if not a duke, the town-clerk would be a _goose_ at
any rate, if both eschewed during their sojourn that hankering after
the sex which was portended by the lady Venus being in the middle
house. Those polite and philosophic preparations having been made,
the state coach, with two cats (the emblems of _bon accord_) the size
of a couple of yeanling lambs, gilt with Dutch fulzie, and spotted
with coffin black, “all for the sparin’ o’ the cost,” rattled along
the bridge of Dee at the tail of six hardy shelties from the Cabrach,
“which could mak’ a shift to live upo’ thristles, or fool strae, or
ony thing that they cou’d pyke up at a dykeside.” Still, however, this
mighty magisterial meteor streamed across Drumthwackit, along the “how
o’ the Mearns,” and adoun Strathmore, like an aurora borealis flashing
from the pole to the zenith, flickering and crackling, and smelling of
brimstone. While its tail drew the third part of the wilie natives of
the city; the other two-thirds took their way in barks and steam-boats,
because it was “cheaper by the tae half.”
But what words can describe the grand array of the municipal
authorities of Perth: Perth, the centre and heart of Scotland--the
capital of the Picts, the delight of the Romans, who tumbled down in
ecstasy when they first beheld it from the summit of Moncrief Hill,
and, fancying that they saw in its green _inches_, its sweeping river,
and its ample size, the Campagna, the Tiber, and the Eternal city,
shouted in one voice “Ecce Tiber! Ecce Campus Martius!”--Perth, which
looks upon Aberdeen as dry stubble, and Glasgow as the dust of the
earth; and which has received within its halls and palaces more kings
and mighty men, than the compass of these pages could hold, or the
sages of its own Antiquarian society could number.
To pay due honour to the decorum, the sagacity, and the harmony of such
a city, it is worth while to pause and learn a little, before speaking
of the equipage. Well, what, gentle reader, shall we learn? Why that
the same gentleman who sat in that splendid equipage as chief ruler
of the city, put to the proof, as touching his Celtic or Sarmatian
origin, no less a personage than the Grand Duke Nicholas, brother to
the autocrat of all the Russias--the arbiter for the time being of all
the legitimate monarchs upon the continent of Europe. The fame of the
city of Perth being, of course, well known upon the banks of the Neva,
and the Kremlin at Moscow having been burnt as the first portion of the
funeral pile of Buonaparte, there was no place where the magnanimous
Alexander could find a fit pattern after which to build the restored
Kremlin, except this fine and far-famed city of Perth. The Grand Duke
Nicholas, from his well-known architectural and other tastes, was
deputed upon this important mission; and, having taken London, the
Athens, and a few such places of inferior note in his way, he arrived
at the city of all beauty; and was received by a bowing magistracy, and
a gaping populace. During his stay at the George Inn, the superiority
of the Tay salmon and “Athol brose,” over the _caviere_ and _quass_ of
his own country, worked the imperial clay to the temperature of a very
Vesuvius. He applied to the Lord Provost in his need. The Lord Provost
convened his council. Their words were wise, and their faces were
wiser; but they could determine nothing; and so they handed the case
over to the ministers and elders of the kirk. These shut their eyes and
opened their mouths; and having done so for a due season, they found
that as the Grand Duke Nicholas was not in communion with their church,
the Grand Duke Nicholas might, in all matters bodily or ghostly, do
as the said Grand Duke Nicholas felt inclined. This response delighted
the municipal authorities, and they hurried to the inn to communicate
with their own lips this plenary indulgence. Provost Robertson hemmed,
stroked his beard, and led off in words wherein the Saxon and the
Celtic so perfectly neutralized each other, that the whole was as
smooth as oil. But, though the Grand Duke Nicholas understood many
single languages, the mouth even of a magistrate delivered of twins,
was as new to him as it was incomprehensible. It was clear, from his
lack-lustre eye, that he did not understand one word of what was
said; and he tried to convey as much in Latin, French, German, Russ,
and no one knows how many other outlandish tongues; but as the Grand
Duke Nicholas could not ascend to a double language, so neither could
the Provost of Perth descend to a single one; wherefore the mighty
mountaineer, who during the Athenian display acted Perth, brushed up to
him, tumbling down half a dozen of splay-foot councillors and ricketty
deacons, and exclaiming, “Try her o’ the Gaelic, my Lord Provost! try
her o’ the Gaelic!”
A person of this calibre, and having buttoned within his waistcoat the
chief honour of a town of this fame, could not choose but exhibit a
corresponding exterior. Accordingly, the coach was the size of a fly
van; the horses would have done credit to Whitbread’s heaviest dray;
and, in very deed, had a sportsman of the land of Cockaigne seen the
emblazoned arms, pop would have gone Joseph Manton right and left at
the displayed eagle of silver-white, as at a goose of kindred obesity,
and fit for the Michaelmas board.
Of those civic exhibiters, Dundee must close the muster: Dundee, after
these, was “filthy Dowlas.” The wig of her chief magistrate, (which
seemed as though he had exchanged it with the Perth coachman, as they
had been taking a groats-worth of swipes and thrippeny blue at Luckey
Maccarracher’s Hotel, down three flights of stairs, in Shakspeare’s
Square,) did not contain as much sand-coloured hair as would have
stuffed a pincushion; and, as for the poll itself, not a barber in
Petticoat-lane would have shown it in his window. Their equipage, which
had once belonged to a celebrated radical, was whitewashed for the
occasion, had two green salamanders marked upon it, as lank as though
they had fed upon smoke--as much as to say that the lading within was
proof against fire and brimstone. Four experienced cattle, which had
been rescued or borrowed from the dogs’ meat-man, dragged forward the
heavy and heartless array; and the brawling burghers took shipping at
their new harbour; but Æolus was adverse, and so they who had hoped
to see George the Fourth saw Holland, got fuddled with Scheidam gin,
bought a cargo of flax, and returned, not much the wiser--that had been
impossible.
This, and much more after the same fashion, was enough and more than
enough to distract the attention from all the Athenses that ever were
built or blazoned in story. But this, and much more like this, was
not all: there was also much very unlike it,--so unlike, that when
you turned from the one to the other, you felt as if seas had been
crossed; ay, as if the very poles of the earth had been reversed, or
as if you had passed from the depth of folly to the height of wisdom
in the twinkling of an eye. There were the whole assembled people of
Scotland,--of that people who, girt with no ill-suited authority,
and tricked out with no incongruous and tawdry pomp, had come in the
fullness of their hearts and the abundance of their curiosity, to
look upon their liege lord the King. The magistrates in their coaches
were senseless pomp; the Highland chiefs with their tartans and their
tails, were a useless, and, in many instances where they had commanded
the small farmers to leave their scanty crops to be scattered by the
winds or rotted by the rains, a cruel parade; but the people,--the
free and independent people who assembled of their own will, at their
own cost, and for their own pleasure, formed a solemnity at which the
eye could not fail to be delighted, and over which the heart could not
fail to exult with the most ample and the most exquisite joy. To the
hundred thousand inhabitants of Athens, there were added full twice
as many strangers, all in their best array; and yet, among the whole
there was nothing taking place at which either law or delicacy could
be offended. Religious and political animosity had been laid aside,
oppression had been forgiven, and meanness forgotten; the people seemed
to compose but one family, and they spoke as if animated with only one
wish,--namely, that the King should come: or if they had another, it
was that his coming might be speedy and safe. Whatever other men may
think of Edinburgh--of Scotland, as a place to be visited, it is a
glorious place for being visited by a king; and, it will be no proof
of wisdom in the future monarchs of Britain, if they allow the crown
to pass to a successor without paying it a visit. Kings reign the more
happily and the more secure, the more freely and frequently that they
show themselves to their subjects.