The character of the modern Greeks is variously re presented; but the greater number of travellers concur in the principal features of the following portrait. Their manners are very engaging, but have rather too much the appearance of obsequiousness and insincerity. They are extremely courteous towards inferiors, and even servants; and make very little distinction in their beha viour to each other on account of rank. The rich are versatile and intriguing ; the lower classes full of merri ment, doing nothing at certain seasons but pipe and dance. There is still abundance of native genius among them ; but in the substantial parts of character they are a degraded nation. They perform the rights of hospita lity with good humour and politeness, but will take the meanest shifts to gain some pecuniary remuneration, and will do any thing for the sake of money. Though ava ricious, they are not sordid, but fond of pomp and show, and profuse in their ostentation of generosity. Wealth is the only object of their admiration; whence they arc almost universally engaged in trade in some form or other. The cultivation of the soil is left to Albanians or
colonists; and every Greek has a retail shop, or is con cerned in some wholesale dealings. Even their princes and nobles who reside at Constantinople, are engaged in merchandize. They are little to be trusted ; but are light, inconstant, treacherous, selfish, and subtle, in all their transactions, always awake to every opportunity of gaining an advantage ; ready to practise the meanest artifices, and to utter the grossest untruths; regardless of character, and more barefaced in their impositions than even the Jews. They show a desperate frenzy in distress, and a bloody ferocity in power, but rarely dis play the coolness of determined courage, and seem scarcely capable of any prolonged struggle to regain their national freedom. See Chateaubriand's Travels ; Clarke's Travels ; Dallaway's Tour in the Levant ; Savary's Letters on Greece ; Tour in Alba nia, Sm.; Jackson's Reflections on the Commerce of the Mediterranean ; and the works mentioned in the histo rical sketch of the Morea in this article. (7.)