“Born into life!—’tis we, And not the world, are new.” MATTHEW ARNOLD. Travellers fresh from Italy perceive an Oriental picturesqueness in modern Athens, but the immediate impression of its Occidental character gained by those who come from Egypt or Constantinople is the correct one. The old narrow streets, reminiscent of the Turkish period, are few in number and lie on the northern side of the Acropolis. Back of them, further to the north and west, lies a very clean and well-planned town which boasts of being a little Paris. The substantial houses and hotels, the dignified palaces of the royal princes and the buildings of the University and Museum, the conventional shops and public squares, the boulevards and gardens, give to Athens the general appearance of any European city that is moving fast toward and beyond a population of two hundred thousand, and is not yet disfigured by the smoke-stacks of factories. A welcome individuality of taste is shown chiefly in the classical architecture of the group of University buildings and of the Museum. Even to pilgrims and strangers the modern city reveals an eager and, in many aspects, a charming life. But a special relationship follows in the wake of familiarity with the new, added to knowledge of the old, Athens. The student of Greek literature finds that he need not always seek the ruins of antiquity or the permanent stage-setting of Nature when he desires a sense of fellowship with the past. At any street corner this sense may be quickened by some person or object which is an integral part of the city’s modern life. Ancient literature not only gleams, like “a stately palace hall, with golden pillars of song,” but also mirrors common things, trivial or serious, which subtly unite the times of Homer with those of Pericles, and both with our own. Greek gentlemen conspicuously engaged in having their boots blacked share the habits if not the politics of Aristophanes’s dicast who was always seeking the sponge and the basin of oil-mixed pitch for his dusty shoes. Street-venders from Rhodes, who beguile foreign ladies with embroideries, are plying the craft of the Phœnician peddler at the home of Eumæus, then a happy princelet and later the swineherd of Odysseus. The peddler displayed to Eumæus’s lady mother and her maidens a golden chain set here and there with amber beads, and “they offered him their price.” Bargaining, the basis of all transactions, is not always as amiable as it is in Rome. An Athenian cab-driver in search of drachmas can be as obstinate as the corpse in Aristophanes’s “Frogs,” whom Dionysus asked to take his luggage to Hades:— DIONYSUS. “You there! You dead man! You, I mean! I’m calling you. Good fellow, wilt to Hades carry down my traps? CORPSE. How many? DIONYSUS. These.