The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1855-12-25 00:00:00

dered how it was that the necessity of departure had
not struck them all before. Some friends did not come
in, but merely left cards : they were sensible people,
and had considerably the best of it. The position of
their cards in the large china dish depended, in a great
measure, upon who they were. There was a. fat,
wheezing man, who had been knighted in the City
sometime, with a full-blown lady, and who gave heavy
dinners, and was very rich, and could procure anything
for money, except his H's. He was a great card,
actually and metaphorically, and was always at the top
of the dish. I dined once at his house : it was a
solemn and dismal banquet. At one time, for three
minutes at least, not a word was said—not even a
platitude was launched. The servants stalked round
the table, and gravely croaked " Hock or Sherry" in
your ear : and there really was nothing left, after you
had crumbled all your bread away in desperation, but
to drink ; and so I took to it for the remainder of the
feast. Once I tried to make some little diversion to
the dreariness by offering to bet that there was always
more false hair at the Opera on the nights of " Don
Giovanni" than at any other representation of the
season (which there always is, and I can't tell why),
but the attempt was a failure. When we went up-
stairs, a lady, who could not sing, tootled out some-
thing, half inaudibly, at a piano that must have cost
200 guineas at least. Then came a dead pause, and
the mistress of the house said, " Oh, thank you,—it is
so very kind of you ;" and somebody near the instru-
ment, obliged to say something, asked whose song it
was, and, on being told, was no wiser. Then came
another pause, and then, as I. felt strangely inclined,
from simple oppression, to stamp, and yell, and smash
the costly tea-service that the servant was bringing
round, by kicking the tray up into the air as a relief
to my bottled-up feelings, I hurried out of the room,
and hnrrahed to find myself once more upon the free,
common pavement.—Albert Smith, in the Keep-
sake.

THE ENGLISH IN THE lONIAN ISLANDS.—This is
not the place to inquire whether the English have
done to the lonians all the good they might have
done them. What is positive is, that Corfu is a mili-
tary position as important to the English as Malta or
Gibraltar, and that they have an interest in preserving
it. What also may be guessed, and that at first sight,
is, that Corfu and the other six islands are better cul-
tivated and more flourishing than any province of the
kingdom of Greece ; the communications by land and
sea are easy ; the country is traversed in all directions
by admirable roads; 'all the islands are connected
together by a regular line of steamboats. It might
therefore be supposed that the islands have as much
pleasure in keeping the English, as the English have
in keeping the islands. This would be a gross mis-
take. Yet the lonians do not look askance at the
English ; they find at need those gracious smiles and
clever flattery, which the Greculi of the name Au-
gustus lavished on the Romans, their masters. I have
seen growing up at Corfu a generation of young
dandies, whoforget Greek and Italian to learn Eng-
lish, who hum " God save the Queen," trim their
whiskers like hairbrushes, and would like to be able
to dye them red. The English, however, are detested
by all, except by the men of cool judgment and poli-
tical foresight, who do not form a majority in the
seven islands. It is true that the English are terribly
English. It has been said with some truth, "What
gives those people their power is, that they repeat to
themselves, twenty times a day, I am an Englishman."
I am sure that at the lonian Islands they repeat it
once oftener than elsewhere. An Englishman, one of
those who have rendered the greatest services to the
lonians, a real Philhellene, Lord —, who spoke
Greek like M. Hase or M. Le Normant, asked an lonian
one day if he did not notice anything in his language
that required correcting.— " Yes," said the Greek,
" you have retained a slight accent."—" I know it,"
replied the Englishman ; " and I take care not to lose
it. I wish that, even when I am speaking Greek, I
should be recognized as an Englishman."—An lonian,
who was riding on one of the roads near Corfu, fell
with his horse over him ; an. Englishman, who was
going by in his carriage, stopped his horses, ran to the
man and held out his hand to pick him up, when he
was stopped short by a reflection.—Are you a gentle-
man P Luckily the fallen rider was named Dandolo,
and reckoned some of the Doges of Venice among his
ancestors.—M. About' s Greece and the Greeks.