Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
But to return to our freshman. His troubles are not at an end, though
he has got his gown upon him. Where is he to lodge? whom is he to
attend? He finds himself seized, before he well knows where he is, by
another party of men, or three or four parties at once, like foreign
porters at a landing, who seize on the baggage of the perplexed
stranger, and thrust half a dozen cards into his unwilling hands. Our
youth is plied by the hangers-on of professor this, or sophist that,
each of whom wishes the fame or the profit of having a houseful. We
will say that he escapes from their hands,--but then he will have to
choose for himself where he will put up; and, to tell the truth, with
all the praise I have already given, and the praise I shall have to
give, to the city of mind, nevertheless, between ourselves, the brick
and wood which formed it, the actual tenements, where flesh and blood
had to lodge (always excepting the mansions of great men of the place),
do not seem to have been much better than those of Greek or Turkish
towns, which are at this moment a topic of interest and ridicule in the
public prints. A lively picture has lately been set before us of
Gallipoli. Take, says the writer, a multitude of the dilapidated
outhouses found in farm-yards in England, of the rickety old wooden
tenements, the cracked, shutterless structures of planks and tiles, the
sheds and stalls, which our bye lanes, or fish-markets, or river-sides
can supply; tumble them down on the declivity of a bare bald hill; let
the spaces between house and house, thus accidentally determined, be
understood to form streets, winding of course for no reason, and with
no meaning, up and down the town; the roadway always narrow, the
breadth never uniform, the separate houses bulging or retiring below,
as circumstances may have determined, and leaning forward till they
meet overhead;--and you have a good idea of Gallipoli. I question
whether this picture would not nearly correspond to the special seat of
the Muses in ancient times. Learned writers assure us distinctly that
the houses of Athens were for the most part small and mean; that the
streets were crooked and narrow; that the upper stories projected over
the roadway; and that staircases, balustrades, and doors that opened
outwards, obstructed it;--a remarkable coincidence of description. I
do not doubt at all, though history is silent, that that roadway was
jolting to carriages, and all but impassable; and that it was traversed
by drains, as freely as any Turkish town now. Athens seems in these
respects to have been below the average cities of its time. "A
stranger," says an ancient, "might doubt, on the sudden view, if really
he saw Athens."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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