Marseilles, which has lost the art and the type of Greece, has kept the Greek temperament. It is no more French than Naples is Italian: both are Greek towns, though the characteristics that prove them such have been somewhat differentiated by unlike external conditions. Still they have points in common which are many and strong. Marsalia can match in _emeutes_ the proverbial _quattordici rebellioni_ of "loyal" Parthenope; and quickness of intelligence, love of display, mobility of feeling, together with an astounding vitality, belong as much to Marseillais as to Neapolitan. The people of Marseilles, the most thriftless in France, have thriven three thousand years, and are thriving now, in spite of the readiness of each small middle-class family to lay out a half-year's savings on a breakfast at Roubion's; in spite of the alacrity with which each working man sacrifices a week's wages in order to "demonstrate" in favour of, or still better against, no matter whom or what. Nowhere is there a more overweening local pride. "Paris," say the Marseillais, "would be a fine town if it had our _Cannebiere_." Nowhere, as has been made lamentably plain, are the hatreds of race and caste and politics more fierce or more ruthless. Even with her own citizens Marseilles is stern; only after protest does she grant a monument to Adolphe Thiers--himself just a Greek Massaliote thrown into the French political arena. There is reason to think that Greek was a spoken tongue at Marseilles at least as late as the sixth century A.D. The Sanjanen, the fisherman of St John's Quarter, has still a whole vocabulary of purely Greek terms incidental to his calling. The Greek character of the speech of the Marseillais sailors was noticed by the Abbe Papon, who attributed to the same source the peculiar prosody and intonation of the street cries of Marseilles. The Provencal historian remarks, with an acuteness rare in the age in which he wrote (the early part of the last century), "I draw my examples from the people, because it is with them that we must seek the precious remains of ancient manners and usages. Amongst the great, amongst people of the world, one sees only the imprint of fashion, and fashion never stands still." The Sanjanens are credited with the authorship of this cynical little song: Fisher, fishing in the sea, Fish my mistress up for me. Fish her up before she drowns, Thou shalt have four hundred crowns. Fish her for me dead and cold, Thou shalt have my all in gold.