There was a small party in the evening at the house of the gentleman who had driven me out, and among other foreigners present were the Count Dionisio Salomos, of Zante, and the Cavaliere Andrea Mustoxidi, both men of whom I had often heard. The first is almost the only modern Greek poet, and his hymns, principally patriotic, are in the common dialect of the country, and said to be full of fire. He is an excessively handsome man, with large dark eyes, almost effeminate in their softness. His features are of the clearest Greek chiselling, as faultless as a statue, and are stamped with nature’s most attractive marks of refinement and feeling. I can imagine Anacreon to have resembled him.
Mustoxidi has been a conspicuous man in the late chapter of Grecian history. He was much trusted by Capo d’Istria, and among other things had the whole charge of his school at Ægina. An Italian exile (a Modenese, and a very pleasant fellow), took me aside when I asked something of his history, and told me a story of him, which proves either that he was a dishonest man, or (no new truth) that conspicuous men are liable to be abused. A valuable donation of books was given by some one to the school library. They stood on the upper shelves, quite out of reach, and Mustoxidi was particular in forbidding all approach to them. Some time after his departure from the island, the library was committed to the charge of another person, and the treasures of the upper shelves were found to be—painted boards! His physiognomy would rather persuade me of the truth of the story. He is a small man, with a downcast look, and a sly, gray eye, almost hidden by his projecting eyebrows. His features are watched in vain for an open expression.
The ladies of the party were principally Greeks. None of them were beautiful, but they had the melancholy, retired expression of face which one looks for, knowing the history of their nation. They are unwise enough to abandon their picturesque national costume, and dress badly in the European style. The servant girls, with their hair braided into the folds of their turbans, and their open-laced bodices and sleeves, are much more attractive to the stranger’s eye. The liveliest of the party, a little Zantiote girl of eighteen, with eyes and eye-lashes that contradicted the merry laugh on her lips, sang us an Albanian song to the guitar very sweetly.
Dined to-day with the artillery mess, in company with the commodore and some of his officers. In a place like this, the dinner is naturally the great circumstance of the day. The inhabitants do not take kindly to their masters, and there is next to no society for the English. They sit down to their soup after the evening drive, and seldom rise till midnight. It was a gay dinner, as dinners will always be where the whole remainder of what the “day may bring forth” is abandoned to them, and we parted from our hospitable entertainers, after four or five hours “measured with sands of gold.” We must do the English the justice of confessing the manners of their best bred men to be the best in the world. It is inevitable that one should bear the remainder of the nation little love. Neither the one class nor the other, doubtless, will ever seek it at our hands. But mutual hospitality may soften so much of our intercourse as happens in the traveller’s way, and without loving John Bull better, all in all, one soon finds out in Europe that the dog and the lion are not more unlike, than the race of bagmen and runners with which our country is overrun, and the cultivated gentlemen of England.
On my right sat a captain of the corps, who had spent the last summer at the Saratoga Springs. We found any number of mutual acquaintances, of course, and I was amused with the impressions which some of the fairest of my friends had made upon a man who had passed years in the most cultivated society of Europe. He liked America with reservations. He preferred our ladies to those of any other country except England, and he had found more dandies in one hour in Broadway than he should have met in a week in Regent-street. He gave me a racy scene or two from the City Hotel, in New York, but he doubted if the frequenters of a public table in any country in the world were, on the whole, so well-mannered. If Americans were peculiar for anything, he thought it was for confidence in themselves and tobacco-chewing.
| [7] | Fano, which disputes it with Gozo, near Malta. |