When I first went to Greece, nearly twenty years ago, the few travellers one met in the country never thought of studying its mediæval remains. We were in search of classical art, we passed by Byzantine churches or Frankish towers with contemptuous ignorance. Mr. Finlay’s great book, indeed, was already written; but those who knew German and were bold enough to attack the eight volumes which Ersch and Gruber’s _Encyclopædia_ devote to the article on Greece, had been taught by Hopf’s _Essay on Mediæval Greece_ to fathom what depths dulness could attain. Whether the author, or the odious paper, and type in its double columns, contributed to this result, was of little consequence. The subject itself seemed dreary beyond description. All the various peoples who invaded, swayed, ravaged, colonized the country in the Dark Ages, seemed but undistinguishable hordes of barbarians, of whom we knew nothing, about whom we cared nothing, beyond a general hatred of them, as those who had broken up and destroyed the splendid temples and fair statues that are now the world’s desire. Even the very thorough and learned scholars, who produced _Bædeker’s Greece_, a very few years ago, never thought of putting in any information whatever, beyond their chronological table, upon the many centuries which intervened between the close of paganism and the recent regeneration of the country. The contempt for Byzantine work in the East was in our early days like the contempt of Renaissance work in the West. We were all Classical or Gothic in taste. Now a great reaction is setting in. Instead of the dreadful Hopf, we have the fascinating Gregorovius, whose _Mediæval Athens_ clothes even dry details with the hue of fancy; the sober _Murray’s Guide_ includes Mt. Athos and its wonders as part of its task. Recent travellers, and the students at the Foreign Schools of Athens, tell us of curious churches and their frescoes, and now Mr. Schultz, of the British school, has undertaken to reproduce them with his pencil. Following the example of Pullen, whose pictures have secured for posterity some record of the churches of Salonica, so often threatened by fire, he will perpetuate the remnants of an architecture and an art which were rapidly perishing from neglect. When I was first at Athens men were seriously discussing the propriety of razing to the ground the most striking of all the Byzantine churches at Athens, because it stood in the thoroughfare which led from the palace to the railway station! Historians tell us the dreadful fact, that over seventy of these delicately quaint buildings were destroyed when the new cathedral, a vulgar and senseless compromise in style, was constructed. A few more years of Vandalism in Greece, a few more terrible fires at Salonica and at Athos, and the world had lost its best records of a very curious and distinctive civilization.