your dear parents have wasted their money in sending you to
school." I replied, "Madam, your company in youth was made so
laboriously disagreeable to me, that I can't at present reconcile
myself to you in age. I read your poets, but it was in fear and
trembling; and a cold sweat is but an ill accompaniment to poetry.
I blundered through your histories; but history is so dull (saving
your presence) of herself, that when the brutal dulness of a
schoolmaster is superadded to her own slow conversation, the union
becomes intolerable: hence I have not the slightest pleasure in
renewing my acquaintance with a lady who has been the source of so
much bodily and mental discomfort to me." To make a long story
short, I am anxious to apologise for a want of enthusiasm in the
classical line, and to excuse an ignorance which is of the most
undeniable sort.

This is an improper frame of mind for a person visiting the land of
AEschylus and Euripides; add to which, we have been abominably
overcharged at the inn: and what are the blue hills of Attica, the
silver calm basin of Piraeus, the heathery heights of Pentelicus,
and yonder rocks crowned by the Doric columns of the Parthenon, and
the thin Ionic shafts of the Erechtheum, to a man who has had
little rest, and is bitten all over by bugs? Was Alcibiades bitten
by bugs, I wonder; and did the brutes crawl over him as he lay in
the rosy arms of Phryne? I wished all night for Socrates's hammock
or basket, as it is described in the "Clouds;" in which resting-
place, no doubt, the abominable animals kept perforce clear of him.

A French man-of-war, lying in the silvery little harbour, sternly
eyeing out of its stern portholes a saucy little English corvette
beside, began playing sounding marches as a crowd of boats came