I pass, therefore, from the museums to the street of tombs, which Thucydides tells us to find in the fairest suburb of the city, as we go out westward towards the groves of Academe, and before we turn slightly to the south on our way to the Peiræus. Thucydides has described with some care the funeral ceremonies held in this famous place, and has composed for us a very noble funeral oration, which he has put in the mouth of Pericles.(31) It is with this oration, probably the finest passage in Thucydides’s great history, in our minds, that we approach the avenue where the Athenians laid their dead. We have to pass through the poorest portion of modern Athens, through wretched _bazaars_ and dirty markets, which abut upon the main street. Amid all this squalor and poverty, all this complete denial of art and leisure, there are still features which faintly echo old Greek life. There is the bright color of the dresses—the predominance of white, and red, and blue, of which the old Athenians were so fond; and there is among the lowest classes a great deal of that striking beauty which recalls to us the old statues. More especially in the form of the head, and in the expression, of the children, we see types not to be found elsewhere in Europe, and which, if not derived from classical Greece, are at all events very beautiful. We then come on to the railway station, which is, indeed, in this place, as elsewhere, very offensive. With its grimy smoke, its shrill sounds, and all its other hard unloveliness, it is not a meet neighbor for the tombs of the old Greeks, which are close to it on all sides. They lie—as almost all old ruins do—far below the present level of the ground, and have, therefore, to be exhumed by careful digging. When this has been done they are covered with a rude door, to protect their sculptured face; and when I first saw them were standing about, without any order or regularity, close to the spots where they had been found. A proper estimate of these tombs cannot be attained without appreciating the feelings with which the survivors set them up. And we must consider not only the general attitude of Greek literature on the all-important question of the state of man after death, but also the thousands of inscriptions upon tombs, both with and without sculptured reliefs, if we will form a sure opinion about the feelings of the bereaved in these bygone days.