The Modern Greeks, and the Opinions concerning Them [pp. 143-165]

THE MODERN GREEKS, AND
to have been, for ages past, subjugated by any foreign invaders,
or overrun by any of them, except so far as the Venetians or
Russians nmay have been transiently received there as friends.
This is the district forming the southwestern and mountainous
part of the old Spartan territory, verifying in modern days its
ancient name of Eleuthero-Laconia, but commonly known, of
late ages, by the Sclavonic name, Mane, (two syllables), signifying "a rock," and probably first applied by the Turks and Albanians, who never could or did get into it, and very appropriately so applied by them; for it was a sort of fortress of mountains, rocks and sea cliffs, which they never were able to penetrate. The AIaniats,* it is true, by the result of a stratagem
practised on their chiefs, a century ago, came finally under
nominal subjection to the Sultan; but no Turk was ever allowed
to set foot on their rocky soil. And when we come to study this
so long isolated people, we find that though they have some of
the minor local peculiarities which might be expected to distinguish a population thLus remarkably hemmed in, not only from
foreigners but from their countrymen; yet they are essentially
and thoroughly Greeks,-the same people in language, manners
and everything that constitutes the substantial unity of a race,
with their brethren of the family who dwell outside of their fastnesses so long and so exclusively held. How, we pray, has it
happened, on the hypothesis that their countrymen of other
parts are nothing but a mingled, mongrel stock, that these so
demonstrably unchanged Laconians should find themselves
bearing the most visible family likeness to their fellow Greeks?
TESTIMIONY OF ThE SPOKEN TONGUE.
Language affords one of the best tests, in a case like that before us; and the existing language of Greece is a living demonstration of the falsity of this imagination of European theorists,
which has been spoken of. If the Greek population had been
so swallowed up as some suppose, or even so largely mingled as
the common notion would have it, what would have been the
necessary and inevitable effect on the spoken language of that
people? What, in this respect, was the effect in England, of
the influx of the Latin, Saxon, Norman, conquering and amalga Commonly written "Maniotes," (see Byron, Moore's Evenings in Greece, &c),
but we give the more correct form of the word.
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