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WILLIAM BLACKWOOD, NO.17, PRINCE'S STREET, EDINBURGH;
AND T. CADELL AND W. DAVIES, STRAND, LONDON;
To whom Communications (post paid) may be addressed ;
SOLD ALSO BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM.

[OLIVER & BOYD, Printers.]

In a few copies, at page 522, the following line is unfortunately illegible:

"Of love upon a hopeless earth."

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No XXIII. FEBRUARY 1819.

VOL. IV.

REMARKS ON THE PRESENT STATE OF CIVILIZATION IN GREECE.

[We have been so fortunate as to procure the following essay from a distinguished native of Greece. He has been induced to give it to our pages, in order that it may act as a harbinger in preparing the curiosity of our readers for the es, à v 'Eλannà, a periodical work which we have already announced to be upon the eve of publication; and in which not only every subject touched upon in the present sketch, but every thing connected with the state of Modern Greece, is about, as we are assured, to be ably and amply illustrated.]

Ir the state of a nation may at all times be contemplated with utility, it must be so in a more peculiar manner at the epoch when its members begin to degenerate from the virtues of their ancestors, and also at the epoch in which they begin to be regenerated. At these two periods, the observer has the vantage-ground of a point of view which is admirably adapted for giving him lessons useful to humanity, because it lays before his eyes the course and tenor of those causes which mainly injure or mainly favour the civilization of mankind.

These causes must vary in number and in efficacity, according as the people among which such a revolution goes on happens to be more or less distant from other civilized nations, more or less favoured by climate, more or less advanced in the civilization which it is about to lose, or more or less deeply plunged in that barbarism from which it is about to make its escape. To these considerations, which must of course guide the eye of the observer, should be added a particular study of the peculiar species of barbarism which forms the object of his observation. The same instruments of improvement do not operate with the same kind of force among a people who are for the first time treading the path of civilization, as among a VOL. IV.

people who are in the act of recovering it, after having strayed from it for a season. The steps of the former are timid; they feel the way before them like infants. The progress of the latter, provided they have preserved any monuments of their ancient civilization, and provided their march be not impeded by any causes out of themselves, may be expected to be more decided and more rapid in its character.

It would be an idle and thankless task to set about informing a man of education what Greece once was, or what she has successively become in the course of the revolutions to which she has been exposed. The last of these revolutions had plunged her into a state of lethargy, not unlike that which pervaded western Europe before the revival of letters. From time to time, only, she manifested a few faint symptoms of life; from time to time she produced a few cultivated men in the midst of a barbarous nation-a nation which indeed paid them a tribute of excessive admiration, but which, deaf to their voice, and blind to their example, derived no effectual advantage from their presence.

No one will think it necessary to ask us, of what kind, during this melancholy period, had been the moral and religious ideas of the Greeks. Ignorance, the offspring of tyranny, is

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ever attended by superstition; and the influence of superstition is followed surely, although insensibly, by the corruption of manners.

Nevertheless it is true, that European travellers-some of them, indeed, persons who have never seen Greece, and who think it quite possible to study a nation without leaving one's own cabinet-while professing to give a fair picture of the degeneration of Modern Greece, have in reality produced nothing but a caricature. They have persuaded themselves that there is nothing to be seen among the Greeks but that which may at all times be found among all enslaved peoples, and which indeed may be seen at this very day among many nations governed by no means in so arbitrary a manner as the Greeks. By a calculation, wherein no justice is rendered either to the acuteness of their understanding, or to the rectitude of their hearts, these observers have in fact been heaping upon the heads of the present Greeks the vices and the errors of all the generations which have gone before them since the age in which Greece lost her liberty. They have not seen, or they have not been willing to see, that the Greeks of this day are in truth the victims of crimes which they never committed. The situation of nations arrived at their condition, resembles that of individuals sprung from parents enervated and exhausted by debauch. The only reproach which can with justice be brought against them is, that they have not adopted with sufficient decision the regimen and mode of life most opposite to that in which their parents indulged, and therefore most likely to eradicate the debility entailed upon them. A much greater proportion of guilt is chargeable on those Greeks who first permitted themselves to be seduced by the gold of the Macedonians, who, forgetting the brilliant examples of virtue and patriotism bequeathed to them by their ancestors, and refusing to respect the voices of those whose tombs were yet before their eyes, were mean enough to sell their heritage of liberty-and upon those who were the enemies of the Achaian league and upon those who, by their wicked dissentions, introduced the arms and the oppression of the Romans and upon those, finally, who, while yet in possession of at least

a shadow of liberty, tamely submitted to the yoke of a barbarous people ;upon all those Greeks a much deeper weight of censure should fall, than on these their unhappy descendants, to whom they have left every thing to be repaired, and scarcely one new fault to be committed. Without li berty, without pecuniary resources, without the resources which light and intelligence alone can supply, abandoned by all the world, exciting among a few of the nations which contemplate them some insignificant feeling of interest, or some barren feeling of pity, but regarded by the greater part with the disputing indifference, where was ever people placed in a more helpless situation than the Modern Greeks?

And what, accordingly, was the spectacle presented by unhappy Greece, that native country of arts, sciences, and philosophy? The same that may be found almost every where among slaves. A clergy superstitious and ignorant, influencing as they please a people still more ignorant ;-a gentry of much pretension, nourished by the sweat of the peasantry, but far more contemptible than them, because more exposed to the attacks of the common despotism, and more skilled in the arts of debasing themselves before its ministers;-fathers of families too much exhausted by vexations, and too much blinded by superstition to think of bestowing a good education on their children;-a youth, in consequence o all these things, utterly devoid of intelligence. Now and then, indeed, a young man expatriated himself for a time, and came to gather, in Western Europe, information which he could not find at home; but his whole ambition was confined to the study of medicine; and Italy, the common scene of his studies, was to the modern Greek what the pillar of Hercules was to the ancient. These young men, moreover, travelled rather that they might learn a trade, than that they might acquire a science (at a time indeed when medicine, even in Europe, was merely a trade), and therefore they carried back into their unhappy country little more than instruments to do mischief, and presumption to prevent them from repairing it. At times, it is true, the study of theology was added to that of medicine; and persons in possession of this double

accomplishment, composed works of controversy well fitted to keep up the hatred subsisting between the Greek and the Roman churches, but utterly hostile to that spirit of conciliation and forbearance, which is the true character of the religion of the Bible.

The information of the more cultivazed was, in general, limited to these studies. The rest were scarcely able to read and write; and this part of the nation, without all doubt the most ignorant, was, nevertheless, by no means, either the most superstitious or the most depraved. This advantage was probably the fruit of their ignorance itself, which, at least, prevented them from reading bad books. They derived all their books from Venice, and, with the exception of these necessary for the performance of religious service, and the few grammars and lexicons used in the seminaries where the ancient Greek language was taught, these books were, in general, the most stupid of all productions, much better fitted to deepen than to dispel the shade of ignorance. It was only to a happy accident that the Greeks owed the possession of a translation of Telemachus, and another of Rollin's Ancient History, two books, which, as we shall observe in the sequel, have been far from being useless to the Greeks.

The nation continued plunged in this deplorable condition down till after the middle of the last century; but in spite of the thickness of their darkness, the attentive observer could not fail to discern, now and then, passing gleams of light, which indicated the approach of a dawn. On the one hand, the few colleges where the ancient language was taught, in spite of the discouraging imperfection of the methods of instruction-in spite of the ignorance and conceit of the professors and the consequently small advantage derived by the pupils, were yet sufficient to keep alive, in the midst of the nation, some knowledge of the language of their ancestors, like a sacred spark one day destined to be blown into a flame. On the other hand, a national vanity, ridiculous enough in itself, but salutary in its effects, rendered the Greeks, in general, as proud of their descent, as if each man could have traced himself, in a right line, to Miltiades or

Themistocles. This vanity, joined to the difference of religion and of manners, and to the unworthy and unpolitic treatment which they received from their conquerors, was sufficient to make a great part of the nation look upon themselves as prisoners of war, rather than as slaves; and, on the whole, it was not difficult, as we have already said, to observe, that the concurrence of a few favourable circumstances was all that was necessary to bring about a new order of affairs.

It is sufficiently remarkable that one of these circumstances was precisely the arrival of that ever memorable epoch, when the spirit of the more enlightened part of Europe, weary of systems and that scholastic method of teaching, the sciences, which had not yet been entirely abandoned, began, at last, to feel the necessity of opening to itself a new path, and of following therein no other guide than the faithful and scrupulous examination of facts. That happy discovery soon conducted the Europeans to another no less important,-viz. to that of regarding all departments of human knowledge, not as things isolated from each other, but as different branches of the same tree, different apartments of the same edifice, no one of which, therefore, could be thoroughly understood, unless it was viewed in its connexion with the rest. The light which sprung from this great literary revolution failed not, like physical light, to penetrate and illuminate wherever it was not opposed. That it had many obstacles to encounter in Greece we have already seen, but we have also seen that the effect of these was considerably weakened by the sentiments cherished in secret among a great proportion of the nation. The Greeks, so vain of their origin, instead of shutting their eyes against the light of Europe, were proud to regard these western peoples as creditors about to repay, with large accumulation of interest, a capital borrowed originally from their own ancestors of old.

In the year 1766 there appeared, for the first time in Greece, a system of experimental physics, accompanied with plates, and a logic. These works, written in ancient Greek, and published at Leipsig by two respectable Greek ecclesiastics, were as well exe

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