hood of Athens, and came home affectionately at night. It was scarcely less respected than his Consul's colours, and the bitterest Moslem allowed it to wander ad libitum, like a stork, over his mosque. Poor Fauvel! the calamities which afterwards weighed on this fated country did not spare him--his museum, his Albanian, his crow, and all but his courage and philosophy, perished in the general visitation. He still survives at Smyrna, and his only consolation for the loss of Athens is its waxen model, and the daily pursuit of his unending task to its achievement.

I was one evening sitting with him, in one of the most delightful recesses of this sanctuary, and making my usual enquiries about the statu quo of his hills and hillocks, when a brother of Logotheti's (the English consul) entered, and proposed to conduct me to a Greek wedding, which was to be celebrated in the neighbourhood. I liked the man, and was curious to see the ceremony. In a few minutes we turned down a narrow lane near the walls, and soon discovered, by the unusual clamour which issued from behind the mud enclosure, that we had reached our destination.

Logotheti's brother was a tall and portly papas, with a mind and muscle far more fitted for the halberd than the crosier. His eye laughed with an air of avowed and arch contempt at the slavery of his countrymen, and with something more, but whether at their faith, their manners, or their condition, I could scarcely dare to say. He was known as an intelligent lover of good cheer, and his cheek and tongue bore grave evidence to these propensities. With this strange interblending of this world with the other, he still preserved, if not the veneration, at least what is not usual in other countries, the attachment of his flock. No man could be more welcome at a baptism or a marriage: he was in some sort the genius of such festivities, and his voice and tread was the signal for the commencement or renewal of every description of gaiety. No wonder then that his knock on the outer door was recognized with a cry of jubilee, or that I entered with a“πρоσкνvw σās” from every part of the court under the guidance of so ghostly a director.

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It was the residence of the bride and her family-and the " bringing out," or procession to that of the bridegroom, had not yet..commenced. The house was of that neither good nor bad description which at Athens gives rank amongst the first of the bourgeoisie. A dislocated stone staircase conducted externally to the first story. It was crowded with visitors and performers in the ceremonial. An unceasing tumult, half between the clashing and jangling of cymbals, and the rough rolling of a sort of drum or tamborine, by way of prelude to the Epithalamium, with now and then an intervening nasal whoop, prepared the nerves and imagination of the guests for the approaching festivity. The performers were few, but strenuous and effective. It was with difficulty a word could be distinguished or heard. I was now conducted, after bustling with considerable difficulty through the crowd, by the stone staircase, to the principal chamber. The bride was seated in the centre, and her relatives ranged in various groups around. It was a singular spectacle. The ceremony of her toilette had not yet been completed. Her nurse was engaged in adding sequin after sequin, and flower after flower, to her enormous head-dress, and perfecting into a more entire ugliness the hideous disfigurements of her counte

nance. The contrast was characteristic. The nurse, now beyond all reach of the vanities of the world, at least for herself, seemed still to live anew in the vanity of her pupil. She was corpulent, comfortable, and teeming with recollections, and burning with anticipations. Her eye brightened at every touch of her picture, and she drew back on her knees, from time to time, with a self-applauding hem, claiming the ap-. probation of the circle as her creation every instant rose into some newer absurdity before her. Such was the nurse ;-the Juliet was, if possible, still more ludicrous. She was about eighteen, of a prepossessing physiognomy, without any strict claims to beauty, but strikingly Greek, and what is worse, Athenian. Her eyes were round, deep, and dark, but they had farther been enlarged and mellowed by artificial assistance. The blackening of the eyebrows and eyelashes threw a melting and voluptuous melancholy into their lustre, but at the same time seemed to stifle all the more refined shades and gradations, and to give that frigidness and pious stare to their look which is so easily recognisable in the Greek madamas. Her real colour was not discoverable, under the heavy hand, and liberal painting of her dame d'atours. White and red concealed every gleam of nature and truth from the enquirer. Her head-dress was an immense pile, built up stage upon stage, and glaringly festooned with coins of various descriptions, flowers, gold-paper, &c. A cousin near pointed with admiration to the edifice. It was a flattering proof of the importance of the family; for it is thus in general that is exhibited the amount total of their dowry. This, however, by no means prevented another portion of the ceremonial. The moment the attiring had been completed, a plate was handed round for subscriptions to the guests; the contributions were very considerable, and the entire, when the circle had been gone through, was transferred to the bride, and counted over with very leisurely simplicity on her knees.

But the sun was now setting, and it was full time for the procession to commence. The bride rose with extreme difficulty, and with a bridesmaid on each side to support the weight of her head-dress, under which she seemed literally bowing, proceeded to the head of the stonestaircase. This was the signal for the Epithalamium. It began in alternate stanzas, sung with abundance of strange gesticulation, and in the strained and high-pitched nasal swing of the most horrible of all music, the Greek cantilene. On tottering down the steps, a young boy preceded her with a mirror, which he held constantly elevated for her inspection. She seemed to profit, however, but very rarely by this rather too ostentatious excitement and appeal to her vanity. Her deep dull eyelids hung lazily over her eyes, and every emotion seemed drowned in the physical endurance of the portentous head-dress. On leaving her habitation, nuts and flowers were flung upon her as she passed, with every good augury which ancient tradition, and the still picturesque phraseology of the language, could supply. Torches were then lighted, and the procession (marshalled with as much attention as the narrowness of the streets and the exuberant exultation of the performers would permit) followed slowly on, and, after numerous windings, at last reached the residence of the intended husband.

The domestic despotism of the ancients still lives in their descendants, and the Greek, in his relations with the female portion of his fa

mily, is little better than a sort of Christianized Turk. Here the rigid code of the ancient Gynæcium still survives the customs and religion which dictated it; and the new faith, which is supposed to have equalized the sexes, has kindly connived at the supremacy still maintained by their semi-Pagan masters. On entering the court-yard of "the futur," instead of the tumult and rush of mutual congratulation, which on such an occasion I had imagined would have blazed up from the susceptible temperament of the South, I was considerably surprised at beholding an apathy, to which even Germans and septuagenarian metaphysicians are strangers. The court was richly embowered with elms and plane trees; under the largest and most lordly of the group was installed the inamorato. He was not reading or listening to a sonnet on the perfections, the black and gold patches, the Juno eyes and eyebrows, the unchangeable complexion, the sublime head-dress, and the tyrannic soul of his Dulcinea, but in the more matter-of-fact ecstasies of his weekly shaving. Nor was this one of those graceful coups de théatre rehearsed at leisure, in order to be sudden. It was an integral part of the ceremony, and performed with the solemnity of a religious duty. Every one seemed delighted with the masterly precision of the barber, and the dash and savoir faire, with which he hurried to its completion. When the head was shaved, and the mustachios had received their penultimate curl, and the biting torrents of soap and water had been quite washed out of the eyes of his victim, a contribution somewhat on a scale similar to that at the bride's residence was commenced, and the generosity of the visitors allowed an opportunity of displaying itself to the greatest advantage. All this was conducted with high etiquette and dignity, nor could I perceive the glimmer of a smile during the entire preparation, I will not say on the lips of the bridegroom (a thing not impossible in other countries), but on the less concerned physiognomies of the most youthful of his attendants. He was now dressed, and sprinkled with rose-water, and in despite of a very yellow and saturnine countenance, and some traitorous wrinkles round his eyes and forehead, a personage whom any lady, not blind to her own happiness, was bound to receive with gratitude and astonishment. The bride, who on her entry had, in the spirit of Oriental humility, shrunk with her portion of the procession to a remote recess of the court, and with a long-suffering and patience which should be held up as an example to all ladies in a similar unhappy predicament in these countries, now began to perceive some symptoms of relenting in her future lord, and slowly left her seat and proceeded with her accompanying maidens to the entrance of his residence. This movement, however, appeared to produce very little greater impression than the former upon the inexorable muscles of her intended tyrant. He allowed her to pass him without an attempt at a salute, and it was not until the last of her handmaids had crossed his threshold that he seemed to awake to his share in the ceremonial. The succeeding portion had something very dubious, or appalling in its mystery. The bridegroom advanced from the group, where till now he had been nearly concealed from the eyes of his beloved, and in the midst of the renewed clamours of the Epithalamium, drew a knife from his girdle, and struck it deep into the impost of the door which he was about to enter. This, I question not, is full of import and significance; but on asking it, my

friend Logotheti shook his head, smiled, frowned, but could not be prevailed on to answer me. I leave it, therefore, to the Congregation of the sacred rites at Rome, or to our own Lord Eldon and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, being both married, will probably solve it much more satisfactorily.

On entering the chamber with the rest of the company, I was much hurt and scandalized at seeing the lady sitting, against all practice and precedent in such cases, three inches lower than her husband, on a throne which had been erected for the joint use of both. This comes of total want of tournaments and chivalry; and is, I am afraid, but too typical of their Catherine and Petruchio position to each other throughout life.

After a short pause, in which the husband looked magnificent and not happy, and the wife neither one nor the other, and the attendants sympathized as little as possible with either, and seemed congratulating each other, as is usual, on the superior advantages of their single estate, the religious rite was about to be commenced, and my curiosity was excited anew. But a glance from Logotheti soon intimated that I was in this instance "de trop ;" and perceiving the other visitors, after a few desultory compliments and felicitations, gradually dropping off, I followed my conductor, and in a minute or two was restored from the duskiness and grandeur of this dreary chamber to the tumultuous gaiety of the surrounding crowd, and the lightness and cheeriness of the open air.

The moonlight was now gently silvering over the rich red pillars of the Parthenon, and twinkling through the vines which cover the modern Agora, when I returned to Fauvel's, and found him seated with a few of his friends in his court-yard, enjoying the freshness of a night of June, and descanting on the merits of Lusieri's sketches, with a little less charity than became an Athenian and a philosopher. Lusieri shared a great portion of the honours of the Republic with the antiquarian, and their feuds were the heading article in the gossip and pasquinade of the day. Lusieri had conspired with Lord Elgin against the Parthenon marbles; and Fauvel had a great superiority over his rival in the sympathy and invective of his allies, the Greeks. We had in the circle, this evening, a Themistocles and Lycurgus, two sons of the Consul, whose patriotism did justice to their names. I know not how the dissension was afterwards quenched or compounded; but, as in cases of loftier importance, the presence of a third enemy made friends, I am inclined to think, of the other two. But a few months after, alarms of an insurrection and a massacre did more for the differences of Athens than they have ever done for those of Ireland; and the sword of the Turk, instead of unravelling the knots, cut them through in the most satisfactory manner at a blow.

The ceremony which I had just witnessed acted, however, in the present instance as a sort of suspension of hostilities; and we should have had a Memoire worthy the Journal des Savans from Fauvel, on the advantages of translations and traditions, the antiquity of modern rituals, and the Paganism of Greek Christianity, proving to his satisfaction, that we still lived in the Athens of Pericles and Demosthenes, and men married after the opinions and practice of Socrates, had not, in the most important part of the disquisition (that of the

knife), arrived an intimation that Madame Gropius, the German Consuless, begged the advice of M. Fauvel, on the subject of a ship which ran a good chance of being just wrecked in the Piræus,-a question which, as it involved some delicate considerations relative to the interests of nations and of his own, he for once was compelled to prefer to antiquities, and sacrifice his pleasure to his duty, and his own opinion to that of the public. Calling, therefore, for his hat to his Albanian, and recommending his crow to us in parting, he suddenly disappeared through the arcade, and left Logotheti and myself to get rid of the question as we could, or to change it, which we soon effected, to the cowardice of the Turks, and the orthodoxy and heterodoxy of the procession of the Holy Ghost-stock subjects, which do as much for Greek divans as the slavery of starving Papists, and the all-sufficiency of the Bible, for dull dinner-parties in Ireland.

SKETCHES OF PARISIAN SOCIETY, POLITICS, & LITERATURE. To the Editor of the New Monthly Magazine.

SIR, Paris, June 20, 1828. THIS month opened with the publication of one of the cleverest works which has for a long time appeared in France: I allude to the speech in which M. Benjamin Constant proved for the hundredth time, to the Chamber of Deputies, a truth so common that it is worn out by repetition,-namely, that the "liberty of the press" is a good thing. In consequence of some legislative proceedings, which it is needless to describe, M. B. Constant found himself obliged to speak on this subject. The extreme difficulty in France of avoiding ridicule in stating truisms, seems to have given an electric impulse to his genius. Voltaire could not have done better; and I would recommend to all lovers of French literature, and of ingenious and happily expressed thoughts, to read M. B. Constant's speech. Though the readers should be altogether strangers to our politics, and to the great question which agitates the whole of France, they will experience great pleasure in perusing this essay of M. B. Constant, if they be capable of relishing Voltaire, Courier, Montesquieu's Lettres Persannes, La Bruyere-in a word, all the treasures of our light literature,-a style in which we are, in my opinion, without rivals.

The English, for example, understand much better than we do how to write tragedies which unfold the depths of the human heart, which excite terror, and rouse all the passions; but for lively and entertaining prose, and for knowing how to embellish with the graces of expression, and give a new face to the most worn-out subjects, the writers of Paris, I think, excel all others. M. Villemain's Lectures are still the rage, and the saloon in which he delivers them is daily crowded. This young academician brings together the select part of Parisian society. It is not difficult to discover the cause of his success. He possesses the power of expressing himself with delicacy and elegance. A common thought becomes piquant in passing from his lips. In this respect, M. Villemain often reminds us of the talent, so eminently French, of M. B. Constant. If the French Academy were composed of the forty Frenchmen most distinguished for superior talent, M. B. Constant would long ago have been the colleague of M. Villemain; but Constant is a Liberal: he entertains bold opinions, and that is what thirty timid and narrow-minded old gentlemen would with difficulty pardon. In his last lecture, M. Villemain, who is this year giving us the history of Literature during the eighteenth century, continued his inquiries respecting that secret prins ciple which governs every thing in literature-that principle which dictatethe fashion,-a thing always powerful in France. Racine, Fenelon, Pascal,