s proved a most "untoward event."

In these degenerate days, a revolution is by no means so serious a matter
as a bankruptcy, and kings require rather more than the ordinary
proportion of wit to keep their feet steady in their slippery elevation.
Greece is therefore clearly in a most lamentable condition, and the
British public who adopted her, and fed her for a while on every luxury,
now cares very little about her misfortunes. Sir Francis Burdett, Sir John
Hobhouse, and the Right Honourable Edward Ellice, who once acted as her
trustees, and Joseph Hume--the immaculate and invulnerable Joseph himself,
who once stood forward as her champion--have forgotten her existence.

There can be no permanent sympathy where truth is wanting, but the public
does not attend to the correct translation of _Graecia mendax_; it ought
to convey the fact, that foreigners tell more lies about Greece than the
natives themselves. Old Juvenal calls the Greeks a mendacious set of
fabulists, for recording that Xerxes made a canal through the isthmus to
the north of Mount Athos. Colonel Leake declares that the traces of the
canal are visible to all men at this day, who ride across that desert
plain. The moral we wish to inculcate is, that modern politicians should
learn, from the error of the old Roman satirist, to look before they leap.
We shall now endeavour to supply our readers with an impartial account of
the present condition of the Greeks, without meddling with politics or
political speculation. Our opinion is, that the country ought not to be
put in the _Gazette_,--nor ought the king to be sent to the hospital.
Greece is not quite bankrupt, and King Otho is not quite an idiot. Funds
are scarce every where with borrowers in this unlucky year 1843, and wit
scarcer still with most men.

Our readers are aware, that Great Britain, France, and Russia, having
constituted themselves into an alliance for protecting Greece, concocted
together a long series of protocols, and selected Prince Otho of Bavaria
to be King of Greece.[A] The prince was then a promising youth of
seventeen years of age, destined by his royal father to be a priest,
and--his holiness the Pope willing--in due time a cardinal. At the time
of King Otho's election, a national assembly was sitting in Greece, and a
military revolution was raging in the country, in consequence of the
assassination of Capo d'Istria. The recognition of King Otho was obtained
from this national assembl