Populace Quotes - page 3
Egmont:
The Egmont of yon city - he is proud,
And cold, and stern, and sorrowful. He keeps
His counsel to himself. He wears a brow
That is a smiling shadow to his heart :
Perplexed with seeming mirth, that shroudeth care.
Exalted by a giddy populace,
That know not what they laud, or what they seek.
Moving 'mid those who understand him not;
Whom he has naught in common with : and worn
By furious guarding 'gainst familiar friends
Who seem, yet are not. Watched, suspected, feared;
Wearied with labour, which hath neither end
Nor yet reward; but only distant hope.
Such is the Egmont of the field and state.
But thine beloved : he is happy, frank,
Open, and known to that most dear of hearts -
Which he knows, too, and trusts it as his own.
Calm, deeply joyful; such is Egmont now.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
But perhaps the most significant factor in the turn to a Greek ethnicism, which resisted both the Turkish turban and the Latin mitre in the years before the fall of Constantinople, was the opposition of the urban populace, led by the Orthodox party, monks, and priests, to the wealthy urban classes and the Byzantine court. After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, recognition by the Turks of the Greek millet under its Patriarch and Church helped to ensure the persistence of a separate ethnic identity, which, even if it did not produce a ‘precocious nationalism' among the Greeks, provided the later Greek enlighteners and nationalists with a cultural constituency fed by political dreams and apocalyptic prophecies of the recapture of Constantinople and the restoration of Greek Byzantium and its Orthodox emperor in all his glory.
Anthony D. Smith