THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS.

assassin of Odysseus, during the siege kept his family in it, and loading the roof with rubbish, it broke down and buried fourteen women and children under its weight. Unfortunately, travellers, and, above all, the English, are now completing the work of destruction, by knocking off pieces from the overthrown friezes and capitals, for the purpose of carrying them home as trophies." This censure does not apply to the English, but to a party of American officers of the United States frigate Constellation, whom Thiersch mistook for English. We have too many sins of Lord Elgin's to answer for not of destruction, but removal- to be silent under this accusation. The report of these outrages by the Americans had reached England before they were avowed in a silly and ill-written book, just published, from the pen of one of these very American officers, named Wines, who boasts that they knocked off pieces of a fallen caryatide, "for specimens ;" and adds, "our Turkish soldier, not conceiving any other possible motive for such conduct, inquired if we had no such stones in America!" Let not the English, then, have the blame. The young officers of this American ship were the chief spoliators of these relics, to carry across the Atlantic; evidence at once of the skill of the Greeks and of their own barbarism.

This exposure, supported by their own authority, is the more necessary, as the author impudently

claims for his countrymen, superior intelligence and higher virtues than are to be found under the "despotic governments of Europe," where, however, so many of them are delighted to live-of course to shine more brightly in our darkness. Yet this person, who unblushingly boasts of outrages upon the remains of these most interesting antiquities of Greece, says: "True greatness never plays the part of the braggadocio. If the people under the despotic governments of Europe are less intelligent and happy than we, it is their misfortune, not their fault; and they are more deserving of our pity than our scorn!" But we cannot give him any pity in return. We laugh to see such an animal swoln to bursting with the conviction that the frog is a bull, and that thousands of his countrymen are conceited enough to believe the delusion: but there is no term of scorn in the vocabularies of the old or the new world, which can express the contempt felt by every man of common sense for the folly of the guilty braggart, who, whilst boasting of his superior intelligence, acknowledges his participation in the Vandalism of destroying these precious remains of the former glories of the Acropolis.