Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/327

Rh in the morning. Perhaps in the wreck of the Turkish empire both these trappings some day may- fall into my hands.

At last we got to the church. When we were all wedged into our places, the funeral service began,—a long course of droning chants and mumbled prayers. The heat was intense, and I thought we should never get to the end. At last the chanting ceased, when up got the Bishop's Preacher, or Hierokeryæ, in a pulpit, and delivered a tedious extempore discourse in honour of the deceased. After this we got out of the church, and I thought the burying was certainly going to begin; but no. After the priests had done their work, the schoolmasters began, and we had to listen to two more funeral orations, read over the grave, after the Père la Chaise fashion. The first was written by a young Greek of the name of Lailios, who had been well educated in Germany. His oration was full of quotations from Plato and Sophocles, and at the same time he took occasion to criticise things and people in Mytilene very freely; and thus his discourse was employed for the same purpose as funeral orations served in antiquity, when, in the absence of such means of expressing public opinion as a free press affords us, the orator mixed up with the panegyric of the individual many topics of social and political interest. At last the discourses were over, and the burial began, when the gamins of Mytilene crowded round us with that unrestrained license which is then' characteristic in the Greek islands on such solemn occasions. They nearly succeeded in