Shocking Ugliness, Stupid Hurry, and Slavish Uniformity

J. P. Mahaffy, Rambles & Studies in Greece, Third Edition. (MacMillan and Co., London, 1887), pp. xii-xiii:

But this is a digression into vulgar matters, when I had merely intended to inform the reader what intellectual novelties he would find in revisiting Athens.  For nothing is more slavish in modern travel than the inability the student feels, for want of time in long journeys, or want of control over his conveyance, to stop and examine something which strikes him beside his path.  And that is the main reason why Oriental -- and as yet Greek -- traveling is the best and most instructive of all traveling.  You can stop your pony or mule, you can turn aside from the track which is called your road, you are not compelled to catch a train or a steamer at a fixed moment.  When roads and rails have been brought into Greece, hundreds of people will go to see its beauty and its monuments, and will congratulate themselves that the country is at last accessible.  But the real charm will be gone.  There will be no more riding at dawn through orchards of oranges and lemons, with the rich fruit lying on the ground, and the nightingales, that will not end their long hours of song, still out singing from the deep-green gloom the sounds of opening day.  There will be no more watching the glowing east across the silver-grey glitter of dewy meadows; no more wandering along grassy slopes, where the scarlet anemones, all drenched with the draughts of night, are stringing to raise their drooping heads, and open their splendid eyes to meet the sun.  There will be no more watching the serpent and the tortoise, the eagle and the vulture, and all the living things whose ways and habits animate the sunny solitudes of the south.  The Greek people now talk of going to Europe, and coming form Europe, justly too, for Greece is still, as it always was, part of the East.  But the day is coming when enlightened politicians, like Mr. Tricoupi, will insist on introducing, through all the remotest glens, the civilisation of Europe, with all its benefits forsooth, but with all its shocking ugliness, its stupid hurry, and its slavish uniformity.