THE wonderful agility with which the Athenians skip about from opinion to opinion in other matters, and the great faculty which they show in altering the attitude and aspect of that everlasting subject, their own city, render it next to impossible to give a likeness of them that shall be accurate for one moment beyond the time that you are taking it. Indeed, if you be not all the readier at your pencil, the chance is that there shall be no congruity or keeping among the features and limbs that you sketch. What you begin with as a Jupiter, you have a chance of ending with as a Vulcan; your Apollo glides into a satyr, and your Venus becomes a hag under your hands. If you would paint a philosopher, however limber or however large you design him, he changes to a driveller or a dandy before you know what you are about; and when you follow him to his home, in order to contemplate the progress of those great things with which he is to enlighten and astonish the world, you find the whole of his mighty mind occupied in fitting false shoulders to his waistcoat, or dipping his whiskers in the essence of Tyne, till the tale run down his cheeks in purple demonstration as he flounders along in the ball-room. Under such circumstances, I ought not to be blamed, although the light in which I have attempted to represent the Athenians be not that in which they may have appeared to others; nor ought they who fancy that their picture is more accurate than mine, to allow themselves to fall into that idolatrous worship of the Athenian gods; for they may rest assured that there can be more than two pictures of the Athens, all very unlike each other, and yet all very like the original.