The leading characteristic of the Athenians, of all ranks, all degrees of understanding, all measures of taste, all shades of party, and both sexes, is to esteem their own idols in preference to the idols of every other people on the face of the earth. Their own situation is the finest that can possibly be found; and their own mode of improving it is superior to any that could be suggested. Their men, taken on the average, excel all others in wisdom, and nothing can any way compare with the brilliance of their women. In their manners they are never vulgar; and in their tastes and judgments they do not make half the slips and blunders which are made by the rest of the world. The songs of their poets (when they happen to have any) are transcendent for sublimity and sweetness; and the theories of their philosophers (of which they are never without a reasonable portion) are ever the most agreeable to nature, and the most nicely put together. Upon the latter point they are somewhat amusing; for in no place whatever have philosophic theories been so often changed, as among the sages of the succession of schools which, shining from the Athens, have dazzled and illuminated mankind; and yet, while each of these theories has been the object of Athenian adoration, it, and none but it, has been the true one. In politics they have not, at least for a long time, been agreed in their doctrines, or unanimous in their worship; for in politics, interest has generally much more to do than principle; and, being by much the stronger of the two, and pulling opposite ways with different parties, it has produced among the Athenians, divisions which are as remarkable as their union of self-adoration in most other things. Whence, it may be asked, does this self-adoration arise? To which I would answer, in the true Athenian manner, by asking where the affections of a widowed and childless woman, who has no hope and no chance of being courted by another, are centred. The Athens is a widowed metropolis: she stands registered in the pages of history as having been the seat of kings,--she has her walls of a palace, her name of a royal household, and her gewgaws of a crown and sceptre; but the satisfying, the fattening, the satiating,--or perhaps, as some would call it, the stultifying presence and influence of the monarch is not there; neither is there any vice-roy, or other kingly vice-gerent set high enough in its stead, to attract the attention, and invite or command the worship of the people. Thus, she is in herself not only the capital of Scotland, but all that Scotland has localized as an apology for a king; and therefore, besides assuming the consequence due to a royal seat, she puts on the airs of royalty itself, and worships her own shadow in the mirror of the passing time. She is the only city in the British islands which is so situated; and this alone would be sufficient to give her a peculiarity of character, and to make that peculiarity an inordinate pride.