With such a stately palace as munificent Nature had built for these
people, what could they be themselves but lordly, beautiful,
brilliant, brave, and wise? We saw four Greeks on donkeys on the
road (which is a dust-whirlwind where it is not a puddle); and
other four were playing with a dirty pack of cards, at a barrack
that English poets have christened the "Half-way House." Does
external nature and beauty influence the soul to good? You go
about Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and
wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands
Shakspeare must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense
of beauty which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a
Coventry ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on
those very same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You
theorise about the influence which the climate and appearance of
Attica must have had in ennobling those who were born there:
yonder dirty, swindling, ragged blackguards, lolling over greasy
cards three hours before noon, quarrelling and shrieking, armed to
the teeth and afraid to fight, are bred out of the same land which
begot the philosophers and heroes. But the "Half-way House" is
passed by this time, and behold! we are in the capital of King
Otho.

I swear solemnly that I would rather have two hundred a year in
Fleet Street, than be King of the Greeks, with Basileus written
before my name round their beggarly coin; with the bother of
perpetual revolutions in my huge plaster-of-Paris palace, with no
amusement but a drive in the afternoon over a wretched arid
country, where roads are not made, with ambassadors (the deuce
knows why, for what good can the English, or the French, or the
Russian party get out of such a bankrupt alliance as this?)