Note 48 — MEMOIRS OF EMINENT LINGUISTS.

Panagiotes was a native of Scio, and was known in his later life under the sobriquet of “the Green Horse,” in allusion to a local proverb, that “it is easier to find a green horse than a wise man in Scio.” The appellation was the highest tribute that could be rendered to the prudence and ability of Panagiotes; but it is also a curious confirmation of the evil repute, as regards honesty, in which the islanders of the Egean were held from the earliest times. The reader will probably remember the satirical couplet of Phocylides about the honesty of the Lerians, which Porson applied, in a well-known English parody, to the Greek scholarship of Herrmann.