Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/621

608 to a certain extent, have hit off the Russian idea. Another point that always struck me about the very highly polished representatives of the nation whom you meet in the capitals of Western Europe is their apparent omniscience, and their real ignorance when you come to converse with them half-a-dozen times. They have a kind of talk which answers somewhat to the Chinese taoli, of which Mr. Wingrove Cooke tells us in his admirable letters about China. It is all about la haute politique, and of permutations and combinations of the limitary boundaries of European states, and of Russia extending her hand to France, and of various wonderful but improbable alliances. But, at the bottom of all this you will find the most painful ignorance of the realities of political life—certainly of English political life.

The Prussian Embassy, under the learned and courteous auspices of the Chevalier Bunsen, could only be challenged in one particular—for assuredly not a word, save it were of respect and admiration, could be expressed with regard to the accomplished host. The only drawback there was, that the society was too learned for unlearned people. A gentleman would murmur something to you over a cup of tea, about a Sanscrit Root, and if you could not by a system of astute diplomacy, conceal from your interlocutor the fact that you were wholly unable to call for your boots in Sanscrit, you ran the risk of being considered an illiterate person. Another gentleman would tell you the last good thing in Runic. And what a fuss there used to be if Sir Henry Rawlinson had succeeded in digging up an inscription somewhere in Central Asia! You would commonly find that when submitted to the learned investigations of the company, its meaning was taken to be somewhat as follows: “I Collihops—son of Lollipops—the Great King—took towns—butchered the inhabitants, to my great glory, and the nations tremble which are the underneath named.” Then followed lists of the poor fellows whose throats this truculent sovereign had slit open during his glorious career, as well as of those who still trembled before him. The bearing of this inscription upon disputed points in the history of Rameses the CXLVIII. was so obvious that it luckily did not require much discussion. And how a learned professor—by whose side you had taken refuge, because he looked mild, and a safe, perennially-talking sort of man—would, in an intellectual sense, come down sixteen pairs of stairs, in order to meet you upon your own level, and instruct you as to the true point of view from which pretty Miss Oliver’s performances in the “Bonny Fish-Wife” ought to be regarded. There was always, however, something about “objective” and “subjective” which I could not make out; and then the last joke of our friend “Punch” was to be looked at “aesthetically;” and what was a man to do who had simply thought it funny, and so, not impossibly, had indulged in coarse laughter upon wrong grounds?

Before arriving at my true “Fish-out-of-Water,” who are rather the foreign wanderers in the streets, and the occasional visitors to our capital, I would add a few words about the Greek set in London, for I imagine it is not much known. The London Greeks, then, cannot be said to be fish out of water in one sense, for the maxim of the nation would seem to be ubi pecunia, ibi patria. They are almost as complete cosmopolitans as the Jews. The great Greek families who have established themselves well in commerce (their chief dealings are in corn and the money transactions of the Levant) are not only closely connected in business, but they daily strengthen their connection by intermarriages. The chief,—sometimes it is the chiefs,—of a firm, exercises an almost patriarchal authority over his tribe. It is somewhat of the old feudal kind, somewhat of the sort exercised by the General and Leaders of the Jesuits over the brothers of the order. No matter what Pericles or Epaminondas may be doing in London at the time he receives the order from above to proceed to New Orleans, or Shanghai, or Thibet, he must gird up his loins and be off. Nay, were Lysander upon that very day about to pass under the soft yoke of the Marriage Deity, hand in hand with his cousin Aspasia, Aspasia must be left in her bridal veil, and the concerns of the establishment receive his first attention. Five years hence, when he returns, he will find Aspasia, who in the meanwhile has inclined somewhat more to embonpoint, waiting for him. I think this is the most characteristic feature of this Greek set—in addition to their great aptitude for money-making. As a general rule,* they strongly dislike the English; and in their less reasonable moments—that is, when they are not doing sums in their heads—they are apt to talk considerable nonsense about a great and powerful Greek kingdom which is looming in the future, and of the hideous atrocities exercised by the English authorities in the Seven Islands. It sounds, too, very strange to an educated Englishman who has been duly whipped and driven through his course of Greek literature at a public school, and at one or other of the Universities, to hear classical names pronounced in the usual intercourse of domestic life in a trivial way. “Themistocles, if you can’t behave yourself you shall be sent up-stairs to bed without your tea.” “Oh, mama! dear Alcibiades has fallen down and broken his nose over the fender.” “It is high time that Pericles was put into trousers; they should be of the same material as Conon’s, but with a stripe down the sides like those of his cousin Agasippus.” “Please, mum, Master Eteocles is punching Master Polynices’ head in the back garden, and they are making each other such figures!” The Greek merchants in England are a very wealthy body.

It does not fall within the scope of these remarks to enter further into the subject than to say, that down by the Thames—Wapping and Rotherhithe way—there is a colony of Lascars and Chinese, who live in lodging-houses exclusively devoted to the reception of Eastern seamen, and wanderers. Their story may for to-day be dismissed with the repetition of Sir John Malcolm’s short chapter on the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants of Muscat: “As for manners, they have none; and their customs are very nasty.” The existence of this Eastern colony is a feature in London life well worthy of study;