Before you can at all characterize the manners of the Athenians, you must have known them long and intimately, and even then it is difficult to be correct. In most things they are so extremely changeful, if not contradictory, that in half the time you would take to describe them in one aspect, they pass into another; and they do so without any cause which you can discover. At one time you would think them all openness and heart, but in a moment they start away, and look exceedingly cold, stiff, and repulsive. They are a hospitable people, certainly, or rather perhaps it is more correct to say that they are entertainment-giving people; but even in the most ostentatious and prolonged of their hospitalities, you always have the impression that they are acting a part—that there is more show than substance in their courtesies. You feel that you are received with more parade than welcome; and if the sederunt be continued, you find that there is more hilarity than heart. They give you your dinner, and they shun neither the quantity nor the praise of their liquor, but they are not so much disposed to give you your share of the conversation, of which themselves and their city form, not the unvarying, but the inexhaustible subject; and, taking for granted that, in consequence of its primary importance and celebrity, you, if you know any thing, cannot fail to be acquainted with it even to the minutest particular, they rattle away without ever giving you the least preparation, and if you shew, or even hint ignorance of the shufflings of their politics, the cases before their courts, or the tattle of their coteries, the utmost contempt is expressed at you, and the most summary vengeance taken for your daring to be ignorant of that which alone is worth knowing.
From the peculiar kind and manner of education which I have noticed, the young men of the Athens are more impertinent and self-sufficient than those of any other place that I have seen. They know not much, and the little that they do know is far from being accurate; but they state their opinions with a forwardness, and support even their ignorance and their errors with a pertinacity at which you are quite astonished. Perhaps it is this precocity in assertion which renders the Athenians so querulous and dogmatical after they grow up.
As the sums of money which can be afforded to be spent or squandered away in the Athens are not great, there is not much deep playing or costly dissipation in the city. But though the immorality of the Athens costs less than that of a wealthier place, there is not proportionally the less of it upon this account; and though the number of what may be termed gentleman-like indiscretions be very limited, yet there is perhaps no place of equal proportion which rivals the Athens in low vice. Indeed, the vices of her people are almost all equally low, or if there be any who strive to outdo their fellows, it is by a deeper plunge in downright beastliness.
Among the dashing bloods of the Athens, the squalor of a house is no objection whatever. Scotch economy prompts them to get everything cheap, and hence there are in the Athens sinks of vice, supported and frequented by those who call themselves gentlemen, that would hardly be tolerated, or even supposed, in the very lowest neighbourhood of any other place. I have been told that nothing can be more shocking either to morality or taste, than the midnight orgies of certain clubs of the Athenian esprits forts; and among all ranks of the Athenians—I mean among all the ranks of those who wear the dress and assume the name of gentlemen,—the practice of drinking is both habitual and deep.
The real state of taste and civilization in any place is perhaps better known from the vices of the inhabitants, than from their virtues; and if the Athens is to be judged by this standard, she has not much of which she can boast, as the broad and vulgar debaucheries of her people, not only occupy much more of their time, but engross much more of their conversation, than is the case in the British metropolis. There is a cause for every thing, and perhaps a reasonable part of the cause of this may be found in that peculiarity of the Athenian education which I noticed in a former chapter. The purity, the ignorance, and the simplicity of the number of young men and boys who are annually added to the mass of the Athens, the novelty of their having all restraint taken off, and the example and encouragement with which they naturally meet, dispose them to proceed to greater lengths in dissipation than if their introduction were more gradual. The limited nature of their finances, too, and the operation of those lessons of thrift and parsimony, which no parents are fonder of inculcating than the Scotch, lead them to cheapness rather than elegance in their pleasures; and the debased and vulgar taste which they thus acquire in their boyhood, clings to them after they are men, and not only gives the tone to their vices, but in some measure also to their whole character. Accordingly, in no place that I have visited is there more license of conversation, more general freedom from all manner of restraint, and a more total absence of scruples of any kind, than among the scribes of the Athens. Still, to a certain extent, they are pleasant companions; but they are so only to a certain extent. In times not very remote, each of the pleaders before the Supreme Courts in the Athens had his “whiskey-shop,” in which he met with clients and solicitors, received fees, and fortified himself in the spirit, for appearing before the “fifteen.” Nor were these grave personages themselves prone to forget the lessons which they had learned during their noviciate as students or clerks, and their probation as members of the Faculty of Advocates. Whatever was or is the talents or the connexions of those persons, they were, and among the specimens that remain still are, democrats in their drink. It seems to be an Athenian maxim, that the bottle raises or lowers all people to the same level; and the Athenians still tell with a sort of pride, that when a celebrated Judge, who flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century, had been missing for three days, and was wanted to aid in the decision of a very important cause, he was at length found upon the top of the steeple of St. Giles’, where he had been carousing and playing at cards with two or three members of that illustrious and accommodating fraternity, the Caddies.
Nothing strikes a stranger more than the difference between the business streets and business men of the Athens, and the corresponding streets and men of London, or even of Glasgow. In Bond Street, Oxford Street, or Ludgate Hill, all is bustle and activity,—you cannot stand still, though you would; and within the shop, every one is completely occupied. The Athenian streets, more especially the High Street, present quite another spectacle. At every few yards you find upon the pavement a knot of idlers, concealing their hands in the pockets of their inexpressibles, and alternately settling the affairs of the world, (that is, of the Athens,) and criticising any stranger that passes. Every shop-door too is a sort of rostrum from which the occasional vender of brimstone or blue bonnets, is often found vending Athenian politics to customers of another description; while, almost during the whole morning, bevies of slip-shod damsels stand giggling together at the entrances of the closes, in which innumerable mops and slop-pails are exposed, but not for sale.
Ever since the days of Allan Ramsay, an Athenian bookseller has been a sort of oracle; and, as the tribe have increased, their oracular powers have become rich and varied. Constable, to whom, by the way, the literary world is as much indebted as to any man living, and who is a remarkable instance of success against the whole current of Athenian prejudice and opposition, has indeed too much sense, as well as too much business, for lounging and lecturing in a public shop; but even Constable is obliged occasionally to submit to the contact of that chaos of philosophic fragments, which, like the atoms of Epicurus, reel and wrangle on the benches by his counter. Blackwood too has a sort of den; but still, when there is nobody in it to gossip, you find his hard face poking out at his shop-door, just as the tongue of a church-bell pokes out at the mouth of that instrument of noise and brass. Manners and Miller—one who is said to be the only genuine species of the nightingale north of the Tweed, keeps a saloon for the accommodation of the Edinburgh blue stockings, in which sins, and sentiments, and silks, are, by turns, expatiated upon, in a style and manner which are truly Athenian. Not far from the Tron Kirk, there is perhaps the most wonderful of them all,—the Œdipus of all mysteries and riddles, as touching law, and learning, and politics—to the junior clerks who attend the parliament-house; the fag end of the Athenian company of comedians, and of the satellites of opposition in Athenian politics. Œdipus believes that the whole world rests upon his shoulders; and, whether he be haranguing from behind his counter, or trotting along the street, he is constantly hitching up his shoulders as if he were alarmed lest that world should go off its poise. But to see this little man in the zenith of his glory, you must see him in the parliament-house, where he is regularly found, as soon as the clerks have gone to the desk, and the players to the rehearsal, running about with so much eagerness and appearance of wisdom, that, until he speaks, you would mistake him for Jeffery, or rather for Henry Cockburn, to whom he has one similitude—that of a naked poll. As he has previously argued or decided every cause that can come before any of the courts, he comes, not to profit by the wisdom of the more express organs of the law, but to tell how far they deflect from the right, by swerving from his institutes.
Each bookseller has, not only his levee as well-attended as ever that of Sir Richard Phillips in his glory was by ten-shilling-a-sheet overpaid authors, but his evening party, in which he shines. Thus Constable dines with deep-going politicians, Blackwood frequents prayer-meetings, Manners and Miller whistle,—this one associates with fiddlers, and that takes the unprotected females under the folds of his calf-skin mantle.
But, although each of the notable Athenians has his peculiar place and way of holding forth, there is a regular intercourse among them all; and accounts current of praise or censure are as regular and frequent among the Athenians, as those of cash are among other people. Indeed, if it were not for this curious banking system, it is very doubtful whether the intellectual “patrimony or conquest” of any one Athenian would be sufficient to set him up in business as a regular and everyday subject of conversation. Thus, whenever you find an Athenian cutting his first figure, no matter what sort of figure it is, in one part of the city, you are sure to hear somebody making a great deal of noise either for or against that figure in another part.