consider ourselves more near the truth in following the practical statesmen who declared that the new Greek kingdom should be confined within the limits where the insurrection had chiefly raged, and where the battle had been fought. Sober politicians could not but look upon the whole affair as experimental; and whatever arguments may in the course of events be advanced for an expansion of the limits of the existing monarchy, no person practically acquainted with the events of Greek government, or rather _mis_government, since the creation of Otho’s kingdom in 1832, can imagine that the evils under which the country has groaned would have been less, had Thessaly and Macedonia been at that time included within the Hellenic border. We should still have had German bureaucracy, French constitutionalism, Fanariete intrigue, Ætolian brigandage, and modern diplomacy, thrown together to brew a devil’s soup of jobbery, and falsehood, and feebleness, over which the wisest man can only hold up his hands, and with a hopeless wonderment exclaim— “Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!” In conclusion, we need hardly say that we cannot agree with Sir A. Alison when he states, so strongly as he does in the last paragraph, that “_already the warmest hopes of the friends of Greece have been realised; and all the signs of advancing prosperity are to be seen in the land_.” It is a great mistake to imagine that the country is really in a prosperous state because Athens has trebled its population in thirty years. Athens has a well-furnished and rather a flourishing appearance, for the same reason that Nauplia looks out upon the beautiful Bay of Argos in such a state of woeful dismantlement and dilapidation: the court has left the Argive city, and travelled to the Attic; and all the gilded gingerbread, which you call prosperity, has gone with it. Let no man be hasty to draw sanguine promises of Greek prosperity from anything good or glittering that may delight his eyes in the streets of Athens. That splendid palace of the little German prince, now called King of Greece, with its fine well-watered gardens without, and its fine pictures within, and its large dancing-saloon, the wonder even of London beauties—this palace was a mere toy of the boy’s poetical papa, and has no more to do with the progress of real prosperity in Greece than a wax-doll has to do with life and organisation. Nay, it may be most certainly affirmed, that not a small part of that sudden growth of the capital of Greece is, with reference to the country at large, a positive evil, a brilliant excrescence, which owes its existence altogether to the artificial attraction of the nutritive fluids of the body politic to one prominent point, while the largest and most useful limbs are left without their natural supply. If there are shining white palaces, and green Venetian blinds, in one Greek city, there is