and a pupil of the great Homeric scholar, Eustathios, who was Archbishop of Salonika. An ardent classical scholar, he had been enchanted at the prospect of taking up his abode in the episcopal residence on the Akropolis, of which he had formed the most glorified idea. But the golden dream of the learned divine vanished at the touch of reality. It was said of the Philhellenes, who went to aid the Greeks in the War of Independence, that they expected to find the Peloponnese filled with “Plutarch’s men”; finding that the modern Greeks were not ancient heroes and sages, they at once put them down as scoundrels and cut-throats. The worthy Michael seems to have experienced the same disillusionment and to have committed the same error as the Philhellenes. Fallen walls and rickety houses fringing mean streets gave him a bad impression as he entered the city in triumphal procession. His cathedral, it is true, with its frescoes and its offerings from the time of Basil the Bulgar-slayer, with its eternal lamp, the wonder of every pilgrim, and with the noble memories of the golden age of Perikles which clung round its venerable structure, seemed to him superior to Sta Sophia in all its glory, a palace worthy of a king. And what bishop could boast of a minster such as the Parthenon? But the Athenians, “the off-spring of true-born Athenians,” as he styled them in his pompous inaugural address, did not appreciate, could scarcely even understand, the academic graces of his style. The shallow soil of Attica had become a parched desert, where little or no water was; the classic fountain of Kallirrhoe had ceased to run, the olive-yards were withered up by the drought. The silk-weavers and dyers, traces of whose work have been found in the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, had disappeared. Emigration and the exactions of the Byzantine officials completed the tale of woe, which Michael was ever ready to pour into the ear of a sympathetic correspondent. In 1198, he addressed a memorial to the Emperor Alexios Comnenos III, on behalf of the Athenians, from which we learn that the city was free from the jurisdiction of the provincial governor, who resided at Thebes, and who was not even allowed to enter the city, which, like Patras and Monemvasia, was governed by its own _archontes_. But it appears that the governor none the less quartered himself on the inhabitants, and had thrice imposed higher ship-money on Athens than on Thebes and Chalkis. Nor did the Metropolitan hesitate to tell another Emperor, Isaac Angelos, that Athens was too poor to present him with the usual coronation offering of a golden wreath. Yet, when the Lord High Admiral came to Athens, he found merchantmen in the Piræus, and the Government raised more out of the impoverished inhabitants than out of Thebes and Eubœa. We must therefore not take too literally all the rhetorical complaints of the archbishop, which are incompatible with the great luxury of the Athenian Court under the French Dukes in the