A tremendous impression, such as that first sight of the Parthenon undoubtedly made on me, would be a very doubtful gain, if it caused the rest of life to seem uninteresting by comparison, for any kind of initiation must quicken rather than blunt the workaday trivial activities, and certainly in this case I lost no perception of the actual in the flash of the absolute. Athens at that time (to fuse together the impressions of this and subsequent years) was the most comic of European capitals; it was on the scale of some small German principality, and while aping the manner of Paris in a backwater, claimed descent from Pericles. It was _opera-bouffe_, seriously carried out, imagining itself in fact to be the last word in modern enlightenment no less than in classical romance. It was with just that classical seriousness that the Olympic games were, a little later, reinaugurated here, and with all the gaiety of _opera-bouffe_ that defeated competitors passionately argued with judges and umpires. At the top of the town came “Constitution Square,” which comprised an orange-garden and a parade-ground, where on festive occasions the regiments of Guards deployed and manœuvred, quite, or nearly, occupying the centre of it: and there have these eyes seen the flower of the Greek army routed and dispersed by an irritated cab-horse, which, clearly possessed by the devil, galloped and wheeled and galloped again till the Guards had very prudently taken cover among the orange trees, for it was impossible to make any effective military display, when harassed by that enraged quadruped. Sometimes I think that this distressing scene was an adumbration of how, a few years later, that same army bolted through Thessaly on the approach of the Turks. “The host of hares” was the Turkish phrase for them, and Edhem Pasha, then commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army, described to me, when I was at Volo after the Turkish occupation of Thessaly, the battle of Pharsala. “We came over the hill,” he said, without enmity and without contempt, “and we said ‘Sh-sh-sh’ and we clapped our hands, and that was the battle of Pharsala.”... How complete has been the regeneration of this versatile people may be gathered from their later campaigns against the same adversaries.