es, still remains, and will till the end of
time.

[Mendeli is the ancient Pentelicus. "The white lines marking the
projecting veins" of marble are visible from Athens (_Geography of
Greece_, by H.F. Tozer, 1873, p. 129).]

39.

When Marathon became a magic word.
Stanza lxxxix. line 7.

"Siste Viator--heroa calcas!" was the epitaph on the famous Count
Merci;[221]--what then must be our feelings when standing on the
tumulus of the two hundred (Greeks) who fell on Marathon? The principal
barrow has recently been opened by Fauvel: few or no relics, as vases,
etc. were found by the excavator. The plain of Marathon[222] was offered
to me for sale at the sum of sixteen thousand piastres, about nine
hundred pounds! Alas!--"Expende[223]--quot _libras_ in duce
summo--invenies!"--was the dust of Miltiades worth no more? It could
scarcely have fetched less if sold by _weight_.

PAPERS REFERRED TO BY NOTE 33.

I.[224]

Before I say anything about a city of which every body, traveller or
not, has thought it necessary to say something, I will request Miss
Owenson,[225] when she next borrows an Athenian heroine for her four
volumes, to have the goodness to marry her to somebody more of a
gentleman than a "Disdar Aga" (who by the by is not an Aga), the most
impolite of petty officers, the greatest patron of larceny[226] Athens
ever saw (except Lord E.), and the unworthy occupant of the Acropolis,
on a handsome annual stipend of 150 piastres (eight pounds sterling),
out of which he has only to pay his garrison, the most ill-regulated
corps in the ill-regulated Ottoman Empire. I speak it tenderly, seeing I
was once the cause of the husband of "Ida of Athens" nearly suffering
the bastinado; and because the said "Disdar" is a turbulent husband, and
beats his wife; so that I exhort and beseech Miss Owenson to sue for a
separate maintenance in behalf of "Ida." Having premised thus much, on a
matter of such import to the readers of romances, I may now leave Ida to
mention her birthplace.

Setting aside the magic of the name, and all those associations which it
would be pedantic and superfluous to recapitulate, the very situation of
Athens would render it the favourite of all who have eyes for art or
nature. The climate, to me at least, appeared a perpetual spring; during
eight months I never passed