EDUCATION OF THE ATHENS.

Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.—Pope.

IF there be one cause to which, more than others, we are to look for an explanation of those peculiarities that distinguish the inhabitants of one place from the inhabitants of others, that cause is education. I do not mean that education which is given, or attempted to be given, at schools and colleges, but that which is produced by the contact and collision of those with whom young men associate at that important period when they are beginning to think and to act for themselves. There is no doubt that more of the character of society in the Athens depends upon this circumstance than upon any thing else, as, so far as my observation extended, there is more peculiarity in the treatment of the Athenian youth at this period than in any other city of the British empire.

It is to this education, for life and not for literature, which I mean chiefly to advert in this chapter. Still, it may not be amiss to give a preliminary glance at the school education, not of the Athens merely, but of Scotland generally, because on that, it strikes me, Englishmen might find something both to learn and to imitate. The idea of having one or more schools in each parish, so established that no teacher can be appointed to them who is not well educated, and so endowed that they can never be corrupted as the free-schools so frequently are in England, or confined to the most opulent classes of society, as the better class of schools are in that country, is one of the best that ever entered into the imagination of any legislature. Even in the remotest and most thinly-inhabited parish of Scotland, the schoolmaster is a man of real information: not unfrequently the son of humble parents, who, finding that he evinced talents and a taste for learning, sent him to school, and to some one or other of those cheap universities in Scotland, where, judging from the number of illustrious names that they can boast of, learning is nothing the worse for its cheapness, till he was qualified for orders; but who, finding his influence insufficient for procuring him the ease and indolence of a parsonage, took, as his only alternative, the humbler and more laborious, but unquestionably more useful, office of parish schoolmaster. Young men of this description are one of the greatest blessings that a country can possess, and rather than that Scotland should lose them, it were more for her welfare that all the boasted philosophy, and all the brawling law of the Athens were at the bottom of the sea. They may be said not only to pursue learning for its own sake, and without any view either to honour or emolument, but also to follow the profession of teachers from the same disinterested motives. Since professions more lofty and lucrative than that of minister of the Scotch Kirk monopolized the sons of the wealthier Scotch—since the free sons of the mountains went to practise slavery in the west, and those of the plains to get wealth and liver complaints in the east, the ecclesiastical offices in Scotland have been almost exclusively filled by the sons of the poor. These almost invariably pass a part of their early life either as parochial schoolmasters or as tutors in private families. The tutors are those who have the best connexion, the most ambition, and the most fawning and obsequious habits. They are menial servants, and with the education of gentlemen they are sent to companion with butlers and valets, to humour the caprices of wayward children, and to hear the fooleries of booby “lairds,” and the scorn of assuming dames, who can see no merit but in being connected with this, that, or the other family, which has borne the same name, and inhabited the same lands since the first introduction of crows and cow-stealing. Connected with this office, at least in the majority of instances, there are humiliations to which no lad of spirit would submit for the sake of the present emolument. The hope, and generally the stipulation, of the tutor is, that his patron shall, when he has drudged and degraded himself for the requisite number of years, “bless him with a kirk;” and this abasement,—this bowing down before the patron, in order that they may, in due time, rise to the living, is one of the chief reasons why the Scotch parsons have swerved from that independence of feeling and of action, of which the example was set them by John Knox, and become as willing and obsequious worshippers at the feet even of delegated power, or of unmerited place, as imagination can picture to itself. If it were not that they are strained through this filter, we should never have had them declaring, ex cathedrÂ, that the National Monument, a piece of gratuitous foolery, or vanity, or political patchwork, was “a most suitable and appropriate expression of gratitude to the Lord of Hosts.” If they had not been studying somewhere else than in their bibles, their answer would have been—

“The Being, whom we profess to worship, and under whose protection we certainly are, cannot be propitiated by votive offerings of stone and lime; and the gallant deeds of our brave countrymen, however gracefully they might be chiselled on the frieze of the ‘restored Parthenon,’ could not, in the slightest degree, redound to his glory, although they might, to a certain extent, flatter the vanity of men. The offerings which He requires are not swelling columns and fretted architraves: they are deeds—deeds of justice, beneficence, and mercy, done to our fellow men. After He has enumerated the most costly and splendid sacrifices-just for the purpose of declaring that in his sight they avail nothing—He delivers this simple but heavenly commandment, ‘Offer to God thanksgiving.’ To propose the erection of any edifice, therefore, as ‘a most suitable and appropriate expression of gratitude to the Lord of Hosts,’ savours little of the knowledge and still less of the spirit of Christianity; and if no edifice whatever could be such an expression, far less could a temple which had been erected for the worship of dead and useless idols.”

The filtration, or winnowing, or whatever process it may be called, which has separated and set apart the more flexible portion of the educated peasantry of Scotland for the peculiar service of the kirk, has been in an eminent degree favourable for the schools, which have thus reserved to them the most independent and generally also the most enthusiastically devoted to learning.

I should have mentioned ere now, that the men who fill learned situations, or are engaged in literary pursuits in Scotland, ought, in genius, though perhaps not always in education, to be superior to men of the same description in England; for the expense of obtaining any thing like a literary education in the latter country is so great, and the disposition to obtain it is so contrary to the habits of the humbler, and even the middle ranks of the people, that the range of classes from whom the learned men of England can be taken, is far narrower than that from which Scotland can make her election. In England, a peasant or a small farmer never so much as dreams of giving his son a classical or a university education; and even among the wealthier yeomen and tradesmen this is seldom done, except with an immediate view to a church living, to which if the person so educated should not succeed, he returns back to the counter or the counting-house.

In Scotland, again, though the gates, at least of some species of knowledge, do not stand open so widely or so long as in England, yet they stand open to every class of the people; and thus, though the population of Scotland be not one-sixth part of that of England, the number of persons from whom the learned men of Scotland are chosen is perhaps greater; indeed, it is positively greater, for the whole two millions of the Scotch people are in this situation; and if all the classes in England who have the power and the will to educate their children be counted, they will be found far fewer than this. Now, as the means of obtaining liberal education descend in society, the quantity of talent must necessarily increase. In natural ability, a hundred peasants, at least a hundred peasant boys, are not necessarily inferior to the same number of scions of nobility; and as the total number of peasants exceeds the total numbers of the others, the whole quantity of natural capacity must be greater. Whatever, indeed, may be their differences after they grow up, and when all the varieties of advantage, opportunity, and habit have come into play, it cannot be denied that there is a point in the age of all classes of society at which their talents and capacities are in the precise ratio of their numbers; and it is equally true that, if they were all taken at this point, and subjected to the same discipline, the number of illustrious men that would be obtained from each class would also be in the precise ratio of the total number. But all classes in Scotland have, from infancy up to a certain period, the same facilities of being educated, and therefore, in obtaining a supply of learned and literary men, Scotland has the choice of the whole population.

But this is not the only advantage that results from throwing the gates of knowledge open to all the people, for those of the poorer classes who are sent to college have a chance of possessing greater natural abilities, and being more assiduous and successful in the cultivation of them, than those who are sent from the rich.

This may, at first sight, appear to be paradoxical, but its truth will become apparent upon very little reflection. The more seductive pleasures of youth to which the rich have access, are, independently of any other cause, sufficient to turn the scale in favour of the poor. To the rich, the hours spent in the prosecution of knowledge are hours taken from the enjoyment of pleasure, and as such they must ever be looked upon as a task and a drudgery. To the poor, on the other hand, the hours spent in the prosecution of knowledge are an abridgment of labour more irksome and severe, and therefore they must ever be regarded as relaxation and pleasure. Besides, the children of the rich are sent to college, not so much with a view to the perfection of education in the meantime, and the profitable application of it afterwards, as because it is the custom, or that their parents and guardians can afford the expense. The pupil who is born to wealth or to honours, considers his literary attainments not only as a merely subordinate accomplishment, but as one which stands in the way of others that he deems more consistent with his rank, and feels to be more consonant with his desires; while he to whom the same pursuit is present pleasure, and the hoped foundation of future honour and emolument, is certain not only to like it better, but to pursue it with more zeal and success. Of the illustrious names that have been famed in the pages of Scotch biography, a far greater proportion have sprung from humble life than are to be found in the annals of any other country. The fact is, that although the Scotch peasants have a strong desire to educate all their children, it is only the ones who are believed or found to possess a superior degree of genius that are educated for literature; and of the discoveries of original genius that are continually making in the provincial parts of Scotland a very curious book might be made. I shall mention one instance of the many:

The gentleman, who at this moment takes the highest station among the philosophers of the Athens, and who would have been entitled to no mean place even when her philosophy was in the zenith of its splendour, is of humble though highly respectable extraction. His father rented a small farm in the kingdom of Fife, and had it not been that accident revealed the genius of the infant philosopher, first to the village parson, next through his advice to learned professors of St. Andrew’s, and, lastly, through the wisdom of that advice, to the world at large, his experiments might have been confined to composts for the fields, instead of compositions for the furtherance of science; and his speculations, instead of grasping the globes of the earth and the heavens, might never have soared above a globe-turnip. That the loss that science would thus have sustained would have been great, even the enemies of the philosopher (and there is no philosopher without enemies, especially in the Athens) must allow; for the lines of his discovery have not only been boldly drawn, but have been drawn in situations which no other philosopher has attempted. If, therefore, the discovery which I am about to relate, singular as those who are not conversant with the modes in which genius, when left to itself, developes itself, may consider it to be, had not been made, a blank page would have remained in the book of knowledge, which is now full and fair in its characters of wisdom. The future philosopher, as was once the case with nearly all the nascent philosophers of Scotland, and may still be the case with a few, not the worst of them, divided the year between the study of learning, and the observation of nature. When winter had spoiled the fields of their beauty, and driven the shepherds and cow-herds into the villages, he went to school, where the Proverbs of Solomon, Ruddiman’s Rudiments of the Latin Tongue, and Dilworth’s Arithmetic, by turns expanded his wisdom, or perplexed his ingenuity; and when the fields were again in flower and the birds in song, he was sent forth to observe the progress of vegetable and animal life, notice the revolutions of suns, and feel the practical philosophy of wind and rain. In order that there might be economy as well as information in his employment during the latter season, he was enjoined to attend to the movements of his father’s cows, as well as to those of nature; and until he had reached nearly the end of his twelfth year, it remained doubtful whether cattle or causation was to be the future business and glory of his life. In the summer of that year, however, the die was cast, and never was turning-up more philosophically fortunate, or more fortunate for philosophy. In one of those village libraries, which often contained more rich variety of lore than is to be found among the countless volumes of even an Athenian repository of books, he had found a thumbed and boardless copy of Simpson’s Euclid, which might in its time have perplexed the wits of ten successive classes at St. Andrew’s. By that strong intuition which ever characterizes superior genius, even at its earliest dawn, he found out that this was a volume worthy of being read, and throwing aside the Shorter Catechism of the Kirk, which had been furnished him by his parents for his recreation, as well as the exploits of George Buchannan, the History of Buckhaven, the exquisite biography of Paddy from Cork, and the sweet songs of Sir James the Rose, and the Laird of Coull’s Ghost, with which he had contrived to furnish himself, he set fondly and furiously to work upon Simpson’s Euclid, preparing his floor, and drawing his diagrams in the same manner, though not exactly in the same materials, as the philosophers of antiquity. The smooth grassy sod answered all the purposes of the abacus, and the cows generously supplied him in a substitute for the sand. Spreading and smoothing that substitute with his bare foot, he engraved upon it with his finger the mystic lines and letters; and, with book in hand, proceeded to establish the elementary principles of geometry, heedless though the cows should, in the mean time, scale the fence, and carry the neighbouring corn by a coupe de la bouche.

One day as he was occupied in this learned work, the parson of the village happened to be on the other side of the hedge, pacing backwards and forwards, and cudgelling his reluctant and retentive brains for as much of the raw material of sermonizing as would serve to put him and his parishioners over the ensuing Sunday. While he paced and pleaded with the sluggish spirit, his ear was assailed by a continued mumbling of voice through the hedge, which caught so much stronger a hold of him than he could do of his sermon, that his steps and his study were both brought to a dead stand, and his outward ears perked up in the fondest attitude of listening. Ministers as well as men often remember the words of that of which they were never able to grapple with the meaning; and thus, though the old parson did not exactly comprehend the extent of that proposition, the diagram of which the young philosopher had traced upon his soft abacus, and the demonstration of which he was rehearsing in very solemn tones, yet he remembered that such words had been used by one of the professors in that part of his academic course which he had never understood. That which is known is always simple, and that which is not known, however simple it may be in itself, is always accounted the very depth of wisdom. The parson was astonished, and, for a moment, he doubted the evidence of those ears upon which he had had to depend through a long life. He tried the one, it caught, “The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle;” he tried the other, it continued the enunciation, “are equal to one another.” He poked his head half way through the hedge, and the auxiliary testimony of his eyes and spectacles confirmed that of his ears. He saw the abacus, the book, and the student, and forthwith descended to the village, big and puffing with the tale. A visit from the parson at any other hour than that of dinner, is always an ominous matter to some of the family of a Scotch peasant. If the young folks be children they dread the catechism. If more advanced, there are occasional terrors of that Scotch tread-mill, which is trodden alone and in presence of the assembled congregation. The mother of the philosopher had nothing to dread upon either of those grounds, but still she felt all the glow of a woman’s curiosity, when the parson approached her husband with so hasty steps and so important looks.

“Well, Mr. Lascelles,” said the parson, “you must take care of Jock, and that forthwith, for I am thinking that he is a genus.”

“I am very sorry to hear it, Sir,” replied Mr. Lascelles, lifting his bonnet, “but he is very young, and will get steadier as he grows up. Has he been letting the cows eat your corn?”

“The Lord forbid either the one thing or the other,” said the parson. “He is a genus, a mathematical genus, and will be an honour to the parish when we are both dead and gone.”

The father now understood that the words which he had at first considered as lamentation were laudatory; the fatted calf was killed, the parson was feasted, the boy taken from the cows, and sent to college; and the result is—a perfect Anak in philosophy.——

That the literary men of Scotland are drawn from the whole range of the population is not only in favour of themselves; it is also highly advantageous to the humbler classes of the people. In as far, indeed, as merely literary men are concerned, the advantage to Scotland is by no means great, because in Scotland they meet with but little reward to stimulate their exertions. And hence they are obliged to scatter themselves over the world. But still, the number that remain, and fill the duties of parochial and other teachers throughout the country, are superior, not in degree merely, but absolutely in kind, to the teachers of youth, more especially youth of the poorer classes, in any other part of the country. In England, for instance, when a man of general information undertakes the office of teacher, he does it either with the hope of making a fortune by teaching the children of the rich, or as a matter of necessity, and as a dernier resort after having been unfortunate in teaching the children of the poor. But one who is to have any chance of succeeding in the communication of any thing else than the mere mechanism of reading, writing, and casting accounts, which after all does not deserve the name of education, must love his profession for its own sake, and look upon the exercise of it as an honour,—which, in one that instructs the children of the lower orders, can never be the case, unless he himself has been educated as one of those orders. It is quite natural, and it is also quite true, that the education which is most beneficial for any one class of society, can neither be imparted nor purchased by any other class. Charity schools will never be held in much estimation by any one who has seen the progress of those poor children for whose education their own parents pay. There is something in the receiving of any kind of charity which is humiliating and debasing; and to bestow a charitable education upon the whole or the greater part of the labouring classes in the country, would be the surest means not only of leaving them nearly uneducated, but of destroying their virtue and diminishing their usefulness.

It is to the absence of this humiliating mode of being instructed, and the presence of one infinitely better and more rational, that the grand peculiarity of the Athens, and remarkably of the provincial parts of Scotland, is chiefly to be attributed. The smallness of Scotch and even of Athenian society, the limited number even of the labouring classes, who, except in Glasgow, and perhaps a place or two more, are all intimately known, as well in their connexions as in their individual characters, and perhaps also the low rate of wages, and the fewer facilities to solitary dissipation, may no doubt account for some portion of the intelligence and virtue of the humbler Scotch. But still, in as far as those circumstances operate, they must operate upon the higher classes as well as the lower; and, as the higher classes in Scotland have no such superiority over the higher classes in other countries, as the lower have over the lower, there must be some special cause which operates in favour of the Scotch peasantry. I have looked round for causes; I have found none except those remarkable advantages in respect of teachers of education, (unless, perhaps, it be that the sober and simple Kirk of Scotland has a more wholesome influence upon the poor than a more showy and aristocratical establishment can exert,) and I think I discovered that those advantages are quite sufficient to account for the fact.

If there were not something in education that made strongly and peculiarly in favour of the Scotch peasantry, why should they be decidedly before the peasantry of England, both in talent and civilization, while not merely the upper ranks of the provincial Scotch, but even the learned and official scribes (and pharisees) of the Athens, are so markedly and so monstrously behind? This circumstance, unaccustomed as kings may well be supposed to be to rigorous philosophic observation, did not escape the notice of George the Fourth. He expressed no unusual admiration at the polish of the Scotch peers, the elegance of the Scotch ladies, the learning of the Scotch professors and parsons, or the worshipful appearance of the Scotch magistrates; but the Scotch people, the crowds who shouted his welcome on his arrival, and who cheered him every time he appeared in public, were a source of wonder and a theme for admiration,—and a proof, against which there is no arguing, that if people receive the education of gentlemen, their habits will correspond, however scanty their earnings or scanty their abodes.

In the Athens, this relative superiority of the humbler classes over those whom chance, ancestry, or office has set up into the high places, is not only more remarkable than in any other locality that I ever visited, but the most remarkable, at least the most admirable feature in the character of the Athens herself.

I have said, and I dare themselves to deny it, that her men in office are a trifling and a truckling race; I have said, and I dare themselves to deny it, that a great mass of her scribes unite some of the worst propensities of the Jew, with none of the best of the attorney; I have said, and I dare them to deny it, that her schools of philosophy have “fallen into the sear and yellow leaf,” and that her philosophical societies pursue trifles from which even school-boys would turn with disdain; and I have said, that her gentry have neither the capacity nor the means of encouraging the sciences, literature, and the fine arts; but though I have said thus, and said it from personal—perhaps painful, observation, I am bound to add, that in point of intellect, and all matters considered in point of conduct, the populace of the Athens are far superior to any with which I am acquainted. When I visited the public libraries, the men whom I found borrowing the classical and philosophical books wore aprons, while the occasional lady or gentleman that I saw there, was satisfied with the romance of the week, or the pamphlet of the day.

This accumulation of intellect among the lower and labouring classes is a delightful thing,—when contemplated as studying history or philosophy, or sporting itself with the finest productions of genius. In this calmness and tranquillity it puts one in mind of the blue expanse of the interminable and unfathomable ocean; its immensity makes you feel it sublime; its depth tints it with that transparent green which the eye never wearies in contemplating,—but, when the wind is up, when the billows heave their masses, dash their spray to the heavens, and deafen the ends of the earth with their roar, the ocean becomes a fearful and a formidable thing; and, when the winds of oppression chafe it, so is a population so learned, and so linked together, as the labouring classes of the Athens.

In the great manufacturing or commercial towns of England, and even, and perhaps to fully as great a degree, in the British metropolis, one finds the labourers and operative mechanics, though strong enough at their labour, and skilful enough at their craft, far down indeed in the intellectual scale,—reduced from their want of emulation to seek their relaxation and their pleasure in the indulgence of their merely animal appetites, and forced, through the want of proper education at the outset, and fit means of obtaining or extending it afterwards, to spend their evenings in ale-houses, and rest their distinctions of honour and superiority on brawls and fights. In Scotland generally, and in the Athens in particular, it is very different. Almost the whole of the working classes there have got such an education in their youth as not only would qualify them for ultimately being masters in their respective trades, but which gives them an insatiable thirst, not for technical knowledge in their own professions merely, but for knowledge in general. If one were to follow them home, after the hours of their labour are over, one would not find them besotting themselves with beer, and discussing the circumstances of a prize-fight, in clouds of smoke over a dirty newspaper, which the reader has to spell as he gets on. No doubt they have their carousals, and when they do drink, they drink deeply; but it is not so much for the love of the dissipation, as for some public or brotherly measure which brings them together. You find one man laying aside his apron to consult Adam Smith, dispute with Malthus, or re-judge the judges of the Edinburgh Review; another will be found solving mathematical problems, or constructing architectural plans; and all the less proficient will be found attending evening classes, at which they are instructed by able teachers, and for reasonable fees.

Society is indeed, as it were, reversed in the Athens; the men of the law give their evenings to Bacchus; those who are called philosophers, give theirs to butterflies; the ladies associate for the purposes of gossipping; and the gentlemen, with praise-worthy gallantry, assist the ladies; while the artizans pursue literature, and study philosophy. Thus, although there be more both of the one and the other in the Athens, than one would at first sight suppose, the supposition is excusable because they are not to be found where one would first and most naturally seek for them.

But if these habits make the labouring classes in the Athens more intelligent and delightful as a people than the same classes are in England, they render them as much more dangerous as a mob. It is true, that any demagogue cannot lead them to any mischief for any cause that he pleases, as is but too often the case with a less informed and reflective population. But if they are not to be collected or set on by every casual breath, it is not every casual breath that will make them disperse, or make them desist from their purpose. They have repeatedly—indeed upon every occasion where they have been aroused and brought together, evinced an union and organization which, with arms and perseverance, would have made them formidable to a large military force; and they have kept their plans so secret, and executed their purposes with so much promptitude and skill, that the whole of the legal and local authorities, in the joint exercise of their wisdom and their fears, have not been enabled to penetrate the one or prevent the other. “The Porteus” mob is universally known; and a gentleman who was an eye-witness gave me such an account of a minor one, both in its object and in its mischief, that occurred upon the result of the late Queen Caroline’s trial, as convinced me that their skill and their spirit have not yet abated.

The populace of the Athens, as well as of most other places, resolved upon having a general illumination, when the result of that trial was made known. I do not say this was right, neither do I say that it was wrong; but it was the will and the wish of the people, and they did it. The official part of the Athenians were of course against the measure, on political grounds; and a very large proportion of the superior classes disliked it, either because they had doubts of its propriety, or because they disliked the expense and trouble. Disturbances were apprehended, and the authorities took what they were pleased to call “vigorous measures:” they gave plenary power to Archy Campbell,—armed deacon Knox with a great bludgeon,—supported the constabulary with staves,—hung bayonets and cartouch-boxes across the shoulders of the writers clerks,—stuck swords behind the sheriff and advocates-depute,—sent for the Lothian farmers and their cart-horses,—collected the military detachments,—shotted the guns of the Castle, and lighted the linstocks,—dined, and put in the internal armour of divers bottles of wine a-stomach,—and then bolting as many doors upon themselves as ever they could, sat down to wonder and wait for the issue. After preparations so extensive in their nature, and so profound in their organization, one would naturally have supposed that not so much as a rebellious candle would have been lighted, or an Athenian lamp broken. But this was by no means the case.

My informant, who had just arrived from Glasgow, where a similar scene had been performed on the preceding evening, with much credit to the military, some little to the magistrates, and no positive disgrace to the people, was induced, by the unusual radiance that he observed in the street, to walk out and see what was the matter, or rather how the matter was. He passed along Princes Street, which exhibited nearly the same number of candles, and the same taste in transparent paintings that are usual upon other grease-burning and gauze-daubing occasions; but the street itself was unusually quiet, and free of people. As he stood gazing at a window opposite the earthen mound, in the decoration of which some painter had been peculiarly happy in absurdity, a stranger took him by the arm, and requested him to go to the other side of the street, as where he stood he was by no means safe. He hesitated, alleging that he heard nothing. “But it is coming,” said the stranger, “and the more silent it is the less safe.” They crossed the street together; and my informant looking towards the other end of the mound, observed that the lamps were extinguished one by one, and though not a tongue was heard, there was a heavy and hurried tread as of a dense crowd rapidly approaching. It came, filling the whole breadth, and about half the length of the mound. In the front were borne two transparencies, rendered barely visible by dull blue lights behind. On each flank were treble lines of men, armed with stakes, which they had torn from a paling; and the whole square, of which they formed two sides, was as thick in its composition and as regular and rapid in its march as the Macedonian phalanx. This thick phalanx moved along some of the principal streets: when a voice in one key called out one set of numbers, a shower of missiles instantly demolished every pane in the windows; and when a voice in another key called out another set of numbers, not a stone was thrown. This mass of people passed along the streets, and performed its quantity of mischief with the silence and rapidity of a destroying angel; and when it had wreaked a double portion of violence upon the dwelling of the Lord Provost, it melted away nobody knew how, where, or by what agency. Meanwhile, the alarm had been given to the powers and protectors; but when they came to read the riot act, and scatter the spoilers, there remained none to hear, but shattered houses and frightened inmates, and nothing to scatter, except fragments of glass. Fortunately, the mischief was not very great; but the manner in which it was done was enough to show the superior tactics, and consequently superior danger of an Athenian mob.

It is not, however, the education of politicians, of professional men, or of the populace, which constitutes that peculiar course of discipline which deserves to be designated, as “the education of the Athens.” That education is a training of the manners more than of the mind,—an initiation into the practices of life, rather than the principles of any art, or of any science. Most species of education imply some sort of restraint; but the Athenian education is chiefly taken up with removing the restraints that have been imposed in other places, and by other systems; and the rapidity with which students make proficiency in it is without parallel in any of the ordinary schools or colleges. A mere boy shall come from the remotest glen or island of Scotland, as timid as a hare, as modest as a maiden, and as honest as a man of five feet in a mill-stone quarry; and yet, astonishing to tell! three little months, sometimes three little weeks, of Athenian tuition, shall make him a perfect adept in all the theory, and an expert proficient in all the practice of the Athenian mysteries. No where else, indeed, can young men be thus educated at so early an age; and it is the boast of the Athens, that she frees the youth of Scotland of more of their antiquated notions and narrow prejudices than they could get rid of even in London itself. The number of young men who resort annually to the Athens as students in the college, and under the private lecturers in the different departments of medical science—who, as I have said, are now in a great measure eclipsing and supplanting the college professors, together with the still greater number who throng to the offices of the men of law, form a separate and unguardianed and unguarded society of youths, greater in proportion to the whole population than is to be found in any other British city. They meet with those of but a year’s longer standing, and these meet those of but another year, and so on, till the total take in every lesson-abhorring student, and every quill-driving clerk, to the amount of some thousands,—all of them furnished with at least moderate means of supporting themselves, and without the slightest check or control as to how those means shall be expended. The studies of the law-clerks are of an exceedingly dry description, and those of the other students are not very different. The infant scribes are set loose at an early hour in the evening, and as the professors in the Athens are said to be far more strict in looking after their own fees than after the attendance of the students, the whole of this mass of young persons are left to govern themselves and each other for nearly the half of every day in the week, and almost the whole of Saturday and Sunday. Athenian apprentices to the law are seldom lodged in the families of their masters; and it is a rare thing indeed for an Athenian student to be boarded with his professor. Hence, both classes are allowed to help each other in the formation of their habits, without any control from the more experienced part of society. It is the interest of the lodging-house-keepers, with whom the greater part of them reside, that their juvenile frolics should not come to the ears of their relations; and therefore each is allowed to indulge himself as he pleases, and the only measure of indulgence is the purse.

While this mode of life holds out facilities for indiscretions which the greater activity and occupation of even a mercantile city prevent, the great numbers take off the shame of individual transactions, and give a fashion and eclÂt to what would no where else be tolerated. Youths of no great advance in life have their nightly drinking-bouts, and boys, in the first year of their studies or apprenticeships, have their occasional carousals in ale-houses suited to the state of their funds. As the greater number of young men in the Athens, setting aside the working classes, whose conduct is very different, are of this description, perhaps they stamp upon the whole place much of its character; and, especially in the several professions connected with the law, they in all probability stamp the greater part of it.

The results are just what might be expected. There is no place that I visited where both the manners and the morals of young persons are so free; and, with a greater partiality for the bottle, and a greater proneness to all its consequences, there is perhaps less moral feeling, and a less clear perception either of intellectual or of moral truth, among young men who have passed through the several stages of an Athenian education, than among those who have had their novitiate any where else. Too young for reflection, and too much exposed to temptation for study, their minds become as desultory as their manners are dissipated; and while yet they hardly know any thing, they are prompt in their decision of every thing; and having once found that it is easier, and gives more notoriety to decide without thinking, than to think without deciding, they become as dogmatical in speech as they are shallow in knowledge, and raw in experience.

The force of ardent and inexperienced passions, just set loose from paternal restraint, the force of every day’s example, the force of ridicule, and frequently also the force of direct compulsion, all conspire to drive every young man who goes to reside in the Athens into these courses, and to keep him in them as long as he continues to reside in the Athens; and be it for study or for business, the novitiate is in ordinary cases sufficiently long to stamp the character for life. Accordingly it has been remarked, that though young men who profited by a regular course of Athenian study, be often very showy and frequently very jovial as companions, they are not very pre-eminent for sagacity as counsellors, or trust-worthiness as friends. Coming from the provinces in all their greenness, without any principle, save that prudence which their parents tried to inculcate, and getting rid of that very speedily, they are left like blank-paper, upon which the Athens may inscribe her peculiar characters. There they grow up, and acquire the passions, and learn the vices of men, while they have the intellect only of boys.

Every part of the system tends to debauch their morals, and deaden their intellectual perceptions, and there are some parts of it that tend strongly to make them as impertinent as they are ill-informed. With many of them, and more especially with those connected with the law, public speaking, or rather public wrangling, such as they daily hear before their Lordships, is regarded as the foremost and best of all qualifications. Accordingly, they not only have little disputing societies, at which the most profound and grave questions are discussed and decided in the least grave and profound manner, but they also, not sometimes, but very frequently, carry the same practices into their carousing parties, whether in their own lodgings or at their respective ale-houses. Thus they learn to make speeches, which, like inflated bladders, are of a considerable size, and smooth withal on the surface, but have neither solidity nor weight. Of those who are thus educated, a considerable portion are scattered over the country, and perhaps in this way the Athens draws both upon the virtue and the intelligence of the age, in full for all that she gives in the way of other education. Perhaps, indeed, setting aside the political taints which have been noted as emanating from the Athens, it were just as well for Scotland, and not a bit worse for England, that Athenian education of all kinds were confined between the Loch of Duddingstone and the Water of Leith. Of those again who are thus educated, and who remain in the Athens, it may perhaps be said that they turn round and inflict upon those who come after, full retribution for what those who went before inflicted upon themselves; and that with all her boasted elegance and taste, there is perhaps no city in which vice is more generally or more obtrusively practised, than in this self-boasted model of taste and purity.

The effects of this system of education may be traced in the manners, and especially in the conversation, of the Athenians, even when they have, as one would suppose, risen above the standard and outlived the vices of those juvenile associations. The jokes which are quoted as being the indigenous crop of the Parliament-House habitually, and even of the bench occasionally, have almost uniformly a latitude in them, which would not be tolerated in similar places elsewhere; and perhaps one of the most offensive collections that could be raked together, would be a list of all the good things with which the Athenians embellish their conversations, as having been said and done by the men of whom they boast; but as such a collection would be relished no where except in the Athens, and with Athenian disciples, it may, with great propriety, be left as a chosen preserve, in which her own literati may poach, when otherwise their stores become exhausted, as must occasionally be the case even with them.

A system of male education, such as I have attempted to describe, must of course require a peculiar system for females; but as female education is every where much more matter of fact than of philosophy, it would be improper to go into any investigation or argument about it. In speaking of such a subject, I might err: by remaining silent, I cannot.