moon, or again embrace his "placens uxor"? As, with regard to Ireland, it is one stock trick of Whiggery to treat the chances of assassination in the light of an English hypochondriacal chimera, so for a different reason it has been with regard to Italy, and soon will be for Greece. Twenty years ago it was a fine subject for jesting-the English idea of stilettoes in Rome, and masqued bravos, and assassins who charged so much an inch for the depth of their wounds. But all the laughter did not save a youthful English marriage-party from being atrociously massacred; a grave English professional man with his wife from being carried off to a mountainous captivity, and reserved from slaughter only by the prospect of ransom; a British nobleman's son from death or the consequences of Italian barbarity; or a prince, made such by the Universal Father of Christendom, the brother of Napoleon, from having the security of his mansion violated, and the most valuable captives carried off by daylight from his household. In Greece apparently the state of things is worse, because absolutely worse under a far slighter temptation. But Mr. Mure is of opinion that Greek robbers have private reasons as yet for sparing English tourists.

So far then is certain viz. that the positive danger is greater in poverty-stricken Greece than in rich and splendid Italy. But, as to the valuation of the danger, positively and not relatively, it is probably as yet imperfect from mere defect of experience: the total amount of travellers is unknown. And may be argued that at least Colonel Leake, Mr. Dodwell, and our present Mr. Mure, with as many more as have written books, cannot be among the killed, wounded, and missing. There is evidence in octavo that they are yet "to the fore." Still, with respect to books, after all, they may have been posthumous works: or, to put the case in another form, who knows how many excellent works in medium quarto, not less than crown octavo, may have been suppressed and intercepted in their rudiments by these expurgatorial ruffians? Mr. Mure mentions as the exquisite reason for the present fashion of shooting from an ambush first, and settling accounts afterwards, that by this means they evade the chances of a contest. The Greek robber, it

seems, knows as well as Cicero that " non semper viator a latrone, nonnunquam etiam latro a viatore occiditur". —a disappointment that makes one laugh exceedingly. Now, this rule as to armed travellers is likely to bear hard upon our countrymen; who, being rich (else how come they in Greece ?), will surely be brilliantly armed; and thus again it may be said, in a sense somewhat different from Juvenal's,

"Et vacuus cantat coram latrone viator,"

vacuus not of money, but of pistols. Yet, on the other hand, though possibly sound law for the thickets of Mount Citharon, this would be too unsafe a policy as a general rule: too often it is the exposure of a helpless exterior which first suggests the outrage. And perhaps the best suggestion for the present would be that travellers should carry in their hands an apparent telescope or a reputed walking-cane; which peaceful and natural part of his appointments will first operate to draw out his lurking forest friend from his advantage; and, on closer colloquy, if this friend should turn restive, then the "Tuscan artist's tube," contrived of course a double debt to pay, will suddenly reveal another sort of tube, insinuating an argument sufficient for the refutation of any sophism whatever. This is the best compromise which we can put forward with the present dilemma in Greece, where it seems that to be armed or to be unarmed is almost equally perilous -to be armed is to insure a shot from an ambush. But our secret opinion is that in all countries alike the only absolute safeguard against highway robbery is a railway; for then the tables are turned; not he who is stopped incurs the risk, but he who stops: we question whether Samson himself could have pulled up his namesake on the Liverpool Railway. Recently, indeed, in the Court of Common Pleas, on a motion to show cause by Sergeant Bompas, in Hewitt v. Price, Tindal (Chief-Justice) said "We cannot call a railway a public security, I think" (laughter); but we think otherwise. In

1 Chief-Justice squinted probably at the Versailles affair, where parties were incinerated; for which, in Yorkshire, there is a local word-crozelled, applied to those who lie down upon a treacherous lime-pit, whose crust gives way to their weight. But, if he meant security in the sense of public funds, Chief-Justice was still more in

spite of "laughter," we consider it a specific against the "Low Toby." And, en attendant, there is but one step towards amelioration of things for Greece; which lies in summary ejecting of the Bavarian locusts. Where all offices of profit or honour are engrossed by needy aliens, you cannot expect a cheerful temper in the people. And, unhappily, from moody discontent in Greece to the taking of purses is short transition.

Thus have we disposed of "St. Nicholas's Clerks." Next we come to fleas and dogs. Have we a remedy for these? We have but, as to fleas, applicable or not, according to the purpose with which a man travels. If, as happened at times to Mr. Mure, a natural, and, for his readers, a beneficial, anxiety to see something of domestic habits overcomes all sense of personal inconvenience, he will wish, at any cost, to sleep in Grecian bedrooms, and to sit by German hearths. On the other hand, though sensible of the honour attached to being bit by a flea lineally descended from an Athenian flea that in one day may possibly have bit three such men as Pericles, Phidias, and Euripides, many quiet, unambitious travellers might choose to dispense with "glory,” and content themselves with a view of Greek external nature. To these persons we would recommend the plan of carrying amongst their baggage a tent, with portable camp-beds: one of those, as originally invented upon the encouragement of the Peninsular campaigns from 1809 to 1814, and subsequently improved, would meet all ordinary wants. It is objected, indeed, that by this time the Grecian fleas must have colonized the very hills and woods: as once, we remember, upon Westminster Bridge, to a person who proposed bathing in the Thames by way of a ready ablution from the July dust, another replied, 66 My dear sir, by no means; the river itself is dusty. Consider what it is to have received the dust of London for nineteen hundred years since Cæsar's invasion, without having once been swept." But in any case the water-cups in which the bed-posts rest forbid the transit of

error, as he will soon learn. For the British Railways now yield a regular income of three millions per annum-one-tenth of the interest of the national debt; offer as steady an investment as the three per cent consols; and will soon be quoted in other securities.

creatures not able to swim or to fly. A flea indeed leaps ; and, by all report, in a way that far beats a tiger-taking the standard of measurement from the bodies of the competitors. But even this may be remedied: given the maximum leap of a normal flea, it is always easy to raise the bed indefinitely from the ground space upwards is unlimited-and the supporters of the bed may be made to meet in one pillar, coated with so viscous a substance as to put even a flea into chancery.

As to dogs, the case is not so easily settled; and, before the reader is in a condition to judge of our remedy, he ought to understand the evil in its whole extent. After all allowances for vermin that waken you before your time, or assassins that send you to sleep before your time, no single Greek nuisance can be placed on the same scale with the dogs attached to every ménage, whether household or pastoral. Surely as a stranger approaches to any inhospitable door of the peasantry, often before he knows of such a door as in rerum natura, out bounds upon him by huge careering leaps a horrid infuriated ruffian of a dog-oftentimes a huge moloss, big as an English cow, active as a leopard, fierce as a hyena, but more powerful by much, and quite as little disposed to hear reason. So situated-seeing an enemy in motion with whom it would be as idle to negotiate as with an earthquake -what is the bravest man to do? Shoot him? Ay; that was pretty much the course taken by a young man who lived before Troy and see what came of it. This man, in fact a boy of seventeen, had walked out to see the city of Mycena-which in those days was as fashionable as BadenBaden-leaving his elder cousin at the hotel sipping his

wine. Out sprang a huge dog from the principal house in what you might call the High Street of Mycena; the young man's heart began to palpitate; he was in that state of excitement which affects most people when fear mingles with excessive anger. What was he to do? Pistols he had none,

not even Colt's revolvers. And, as nobody came out to his aid, he put his hand to the ground; seized a chermadion (or paving-stone), smashed the skull of the odious brute,-and with quite as much merit as Count Robert of Paris was entitled to have claimed from his lucky hit in the dungeon,

VOL. VII

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-then walked off to report his little exploit to his cousin at the hotel? But what followed? The wretches in the house, who never cared to show themselves so long as it might only be the dog killing a boy, all came tumbling out by crowds when once it became clear that a boy had killed the dog. "A la lanterne !" they yelled out; valiantly charged en masse; and among them they managed to kill the boy. But there was a reckoning to pay for this. Had they known who it was that sat drinking at the hotel, they would have thought twice before they backed their brute. That cousin, whom the poor boy had left at his wine, happened to be an ugly customer-Hercules incog. It is needless to specify the result. The child unborn had reason to rue the murder of the boy. For his cousin proved quite as deaf to all argument or submission as their own foul thief of a dog or themselves. Suffice it that the royal house of Mycenae, in the language of Napoleon's edicts, ceased to reign. But here is the evil: few men leave a Hercules at their hotel; and all will have to stand the vindictive fury of the natives for their canine friends, if you should happen to pistol them. Be it in deliverance of your own life, or even of a lady's by your side, no apology would be listened to. In fact, besides the disproportionate annoyance to a traveller's nerves that he shall be kept uneasy at every turn of the road in mere anxiety as to the next recurrence of struggles so desperate, it arms the indignation of a bold Briton beforehand that a horrid brute shall be thought entitled to kill him, and, if he does, it is pronounced an accident, but if he, a son of the mighty island, kills the brute, instantly a little hybrid Greek peasant shall treat it as murder.

Many years ago, we experienced the selfsame annoyance in the North of England. Let no man talk of courage in such cases. Most justly did Maréchal Saxe ask an officer sneeringly, who protested that he had never known the sensation of fear, and could not well imagine what it was like, had he never snuffed a candle with his fingers? "Because, in that case," said the veteran, “I fancy you must have felt afraid of burning your thumb.' A brave man,

on a service of known danger, braces up his distinct effort to the necessities of his duty.

mind by a The great