Excerpt from Vacation Tourists: Notes of Travel in 1862-3
We were not to enter at once upon the startling contrasts of Oriental life. To those who have stept on board a London steamer in the gloom of an English October morning, and have only quitted it to disembark under the glowing hues of an Eastern sunrise, which lights up the distances with a gorgeous gilding, but reveals not yet the nearer squalor of a Moslem city, there is a bewildering, an almost oppressive consciousness of the change. We, however, had spent a few days at Malta, where the steep streets of Valetta, with the latticed balconies, reminded us that the old knights had brought their architecture from Jerusalem and Rhodes; while the bright black eyes of the Maltese maidens, peering from under their sombre faldettas, told of a yet earlier immigration from the lands of the sun. Their language, too, more tenacious of life than even the Welshman's Cymry, has resisted all the blandishments of its soft Italian neighbour, and remains as pure and as guttural an Arabic as ever. Two days spent at Athens had next introduced us to those most oriental of occidentals, the modern Greeks, against whom let those inveigh, who have not experienced the hospitality of Mainote shepherds, and the courtesy of Eleusinian fishermen.
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