The whole sports and amusements that are peculiar and congenial to the Athenians seem to be regulated by a kind of Salique Law. They being such as females can neither join in nor, in most instances, witness. They are of two kinds: the amusements of the tavern, and the amusements of the turf. In the former, “high jinks,” and the other harmless fooleries of the olden time, have given place to the orgies of hell-fire clubs, and others that are better undescribed; but in the latter, “golf” and “curling” continue to divide the year, and the wisdom of the Athens may be seen during the summer exercising itself daily in urging the ball upon Bruntsfield-Links, and during the winter in hurling large stones along the ice upon the Loch of Duddingstone. Although there be many good places for walking in the vicinity of the Athens, no such thing is known as a public promenade—that is forbidden on Sunday, and, except a trot along Princes Street, and a moon-light turn around the Calton, the gentlemen of the Athens are too busy, either in doing something, or in doing nothing, for promenading during the week. Drive there is none, and it is not much to be regretted, for there is absolutely nothing to be driven.
Another small feature in the character of the Athenians is the high and supercilious disdain with which they affect to look down, not merely upon their fellow-Scotchmen, but upon all the world. How they originally came by this quality, it would not be easy to determine, and therefore it is, perhaps, needless to inquire; but, as it is permanent and general, it must have something upon which it permanently feeds. It is by no means peculiar to those who are born in the Athens; for no sooner does a Lowland clown take up his locality there as a writer’s clerk, than he begins to toss up his head at the land which produced and fed him, and “writes himself armigero; in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, armigero.” And no sooner does a tattered and trowserless Rorie escape from the wilds of Sutherland, or the woods of Rannoch, to lug half an Athenian fair one from tea-party to tea-party, than “she is a shentlemans, and teuks her whisky wi’ a ‘Cot tam’ like a loört;” and, in fact, it seems a contest between those two sets of worthies, which shall take the lead in Athenian dandyism. Indeed, in personal grace at least, the “shentlemans” must be allowed to have much the better of the “armigero.” Light food and long journeys give to the former great buoyancy of spirits, and elasticity of muscle; and it is wonderful to notice, with what a dignified and chieftain-like air, they thumb a pitch-black pack of cards, or “teuk oot the linin’” of a quart pot of small beer, or quartern of the dew of the mountains, as they hold their morning levee at a corner in Queen Street or Abercrombie Place. The “armigero,” on the other hand, is as gawky-looking an article as it is possible to meet with, or even to conceive. His feet, which probably not six weeks previous were dragging a stone weight of shoes and mud, through the clay of Gowrie, or the tough loam of Lothian or Fife, are squeezed into a pair of boots, upon which they are taking vengeance, by stretching the leg an inch and a half over every side of the heel; his great red hands, put you more in mind of lobsters than of any thing human, and they are dangling from his shoulders as if each articulation were strung with wire; and when his deep and dismal Doric is drawled out into what is reckoned the fashionable accent in the Athens, you can liken it to nothing but a duet composed of the love songs of Jack Ass and Tom Cat. In consequence of the number of those two classes of Athenian dandies, dandyism of a higher order is banished. I mentioned formerly that there is no such thing either as a drive or an article driven (quills always excepted,) anywhere about the Athens; and therefore no fashionable gentlemen could endure the association of the Athenian pavé. If such men should by accident get there, he would not be eclipsed, but he would be absolutely buried under the thick mass of the turf of the mountains, and the clods of the valleys.
Perhaps it is this total absence of every thing elegant in the shape of man from the public streets and walks of the Athens, that has given so singular a twist to the minds and manners of the Athenian fair. Those dandies, instead of being objects for admiration, are subjects for criticism; and when an Athenian belle first quits her bread and butter, and flits forth to conquer the world—heedless of the fact, that such was the condition of a dear papa ere he booed himself into some government office, “processed” (I do not use that word in the Yankee meaning,) into the management of some laird’s estate, or the estate itself—she curls up her nose at these, the only “creatures” that she meets, with so much force as to give it, as Dr. Barclay would say, “a sidereal aspect” for life. For a long time she holds fast her aversion; but though her nose be elevated, her fortunes do not rise along with it. Time drives the wheels of his curricle across her countenance, and there is no filling up the ruts which they leave. Meanwhile the despised clerks become wigged advocates, or wily solicitors; and the lady stretches her neck over her six-pair-of-stairs window, to catch a glance of the bustling man of business whom she despised and contemned when he was a Princes-street walking boy, and would have accounted her society and countenance the very choicest thing in the world. Time, who is the most delightful of all visitors during the early stage of his acquaintance, gradually introduces his friends; and at last, old hobbling Despair is admitted into his coterie. In some places, the ladies to whom he has been introduced seek their quietus at the card-table; in others, they abandon this world for the next, and very frequently choose the by-paths to heaven—because a way thronged with dissenting ministers is always a sort of love-lane, in which a lady may at least gather the dry stalks of those flowers which she neglected to pull while they were in season. But in the Athens they go another way to work,—they dip their stockings in heaven’s azure, pass through the hoops of small philosophy to the heaven-ward attic, (from which, perchance, the Athens takes its name,) and thence launch the bolts of their criticism against all the world below—that is, all the world of their own sex, and below their own age.
Thus have I with, as an Athenian Literatus would say, “the softest feather dipt in mildest ink” and with uniform watchfulness against unmerited praise and undeserved censure, noted down a few of those features and traits which stamp upon the Modern Athens, the isolation and individuality of her character, as she stands away from other cities, and appears in herself. Had I followed her own modus operandi,—had I torn in pieces the private characters of all to whom I found it necessary to advert for the purposes of illustration, and sported with the mangled fragments in the open streets,—had I dug into their family vaults, and wantonly exposed the bones of their ancestors to the gaze of every passer by,—and had I set the signet of my approbation or disapprobation upon them, not on account of what they were in themselves, but of whence they sprung, what they possessed, and how they were connected,—then, assuredly, the spirit of my writing would have been more in accordance with the Athenian spirit, and I would have been loved, lauded, and adopted as a worthy and hopeful son of the aspiring attic of the Græcia mendax. But such honour is not my ambition; and therefore my study has been to describe things with all the simplicity of truth, and, as in whatever bearing the semblance of censure I have written, I have wished and attempted to be corrective rather than caustic—to go to the causes of evil rather than to play with the symptoms of it, I must conclude, that if any shall blame me for the freedom of my words, they must do it because their hearts are smitten, and not because their deeds are misrepresented. The Athens boasts of herself as a model of elegance and of taste: I found her a compound of squalour and of vulgarity. She boasts of her philosophy: I found it pursuing thistle-down over the wilderness. She boasts of her literary spirit: I found her literature a mere disjointed skeleton, or rather the cast-skin of a toothless serpent. She boasts of her public spirit: I found almost every man pursuing his own petty interests, by the most sinister and contemptible means; and, perchance, the most noisy of her patriots standing open-mouthed, if so that the very smallest fragment of place or pension might drop into them. She boasts of the encouragements that she has given to genius: I looked into the record, and I found that every man of genius who had depended upon her patronage, had been debauched and starved. She boasts of the purity of her manners: I found the one sex engaged in slander as a trade, and the other in low sensuality as a profession. Under those findings—and they required not to be sought—I had no alternative for my judgment. When she redeems herself from them, and becomes in reality even something like what she would call herself in name, let her then make comparisons with the Gem of ancient Greece. Let her give some proof that Minerva Parthenon is her tutelar goddess; when she has done so, let her build the temple to that divinity; and, as she finishes the sculpture of the last metope, with deeds of her own worthy of being recorded, I (as the Turk did when her countrymen completed the spoliation of the ancient Athena,) shall to the completion of the merit which she claims, subscribe
ΤΕΛΟΣ
LONDON:
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