However, the barbarian, when roused to action,{15}
is a very different being from the barbarian
at rest. "The Turk," says Mr. Thornton, "is
usually placid, hypochondriac, and
unimpassioned; but, when the customary sedateness of
his temper is ruffled, his passions ... are{20}
furious and uncontrollable. The individual seems
possessed with all the ungovernable fury of a
multitude; and all ties, all attachments, all
natural and moral obligations, are forgotten or
despised, till his rage subsides." A similar{25}
remark is made by a writer of the day: "The Turk
on horseback has no resemblance to the Turk
reclining on his carpet. He there assumes a
vigor, and displays a dexterity, which few
Europeans would be capable of emulating; no{30}
horsemen surpass the Turks; and, with all the
indolence of which they are accused, no people
are more fond of the violent exercise of riding."

So was it with their ancestors, the Tartars;
now dosing on their horses or their wagons, now{5}
galloping over the plains from morning to night.
However, these successive phases of Turkish
character, as reported by travelers, have seemed
to readers as inconsistencies in their reports;
Thornton accepts the inconsistency. "The{10}
national character of the Turks," he says, "is a
composition of contradictory qualities. We find
them brave and pusillanimous; gentle and
ferocious; resolute and inconstant; active and
indolent; fastidiously abstemious, and{15}
indiscriminately indulgent. The great are alternately
haughty and humble, arrogant and cringing,
liberal and sordid." [39] What is this but to say in
one word that we find them barbarians?

According to these distinct moods or phases{20}
of character, they will leave very various
impressions of themselves on the minds of successive
beholders. A traveler finds them in their
ordinary state in repose and serenity; he is surprised
and startled to find them so different from what {25}
he imagined; he admires and extols them, and
inveighs against the prejudice which has
slandered them to the European world. He finds them
mild and patient, tender to the brute creation, as
becomes the, children of a Tartar shepherd, kind{30}
and hospitable, self-possessed and dignified, the
lowest classes sociable with each other, and the
children gamesome. It is true; they are as noble
as the lion of the desert, and as gentle and as
playful as the fireside cat. Our traveler observes{5}
all this;[40] and seems to forget that from the
humblest to the highest of the feline tribe, from
the cat to the lion, the most wanton and
tyrannical cruelty alternates with qualities more
engaging or more elevated. Other barbarous{10}
tribes also have their innocent aspects—from
the Scythians in the classical poets and historians
down to the Lewchoo islanders in the pages of
Basil Hall.

But whatever be the natural excellences of{15}
the Turks, progressive they are not. This Sir
Charles Fellows seems to allow: "My intimacy
with the character of the Turks," he says, "which
has led me to think so highly of their moral
excellence, has not given me the same favorable{20}
impression of the development of their mental
powers. Their refinement is of manners and
affections; there is little cultivation or activity
of mind among them." This admission implies
a great deal, and brings us to a fresh{25}
consideration. Observe, they were in the eighth century
of their political existence when Thornton and
Volney lived among them, and these authors
report of them as follows: "Their buildings,"
says Thornton, "are heavy in their proportions,{30}
bad in detail, both in taste and execution,
fantastic in decoration, and destitute of genius.
Their cities are not decorated with public
monuments, whose object is to enliven or to embellish."
Their religion forbids them every sort of {5}
painting, sculpture, or engraving; thus the fine arts
cannot exist among them. They have no music
but vocal; and know of no accompaniment
except a bass of one note like that of the bagpipe.
Their singing is in a great measure recitative,{10}
with little variation of note. They have scarcely
any notion of medicine or surgery; and they do
not allow of anatomy. As to science, the
telescope, the microscope, the electric battery, are
unknown, except as playthings. The compass {15}
is not universally employed in their navy, nor
are its common purposes thoroughly understood.
Navigation, astronomy, geography, chemistry,
are either not known, or practiced only on
antiquated and exploded principles. As to their{20}
civil and criminal codes of law, these are
unalterably fixed in the Koran....

Compare the Rome of Junius Brutus to the
Rome of Constantine, 800 years afterwards. In
each of these polities there was a continuous{25}
progression, and the end was unlike the
beginning; but the Turks, except that they have gained
the faculty of political union, are pretty much
what they were when they crossed the Jaxartes
and Oxus. Again, at the time of Togrul Beg, the{30}
Greek schism also took place; now from Michael
Cerularius, in 1054, to Anthimus, in 1853,
Patriarchs of Constantinople, eight centuries have
passed of religious deadness and insensibility: a
longer time has passed in China of a similar
political inertness: yet China has preserved at{5}
least the civilization, and Greece the ecclesiastical
science, with which they respectively passed into
their long sleep; but the Turks of this day are
still in the less than infancy of art, literature,
philosophy, and general knowledge; and we may{10}
fairly conclude that, if they have not learned
the very alphabet of science in eight hundred
years, they are not likely to set to work on it in
the nine hundredth.

It is true that in the last quarter of a century{15}
efforts have been made by the government of
Constantinople to innovate on the existing
condition of its people; and it has addressed itself
in the first instance to certain details of daily
Turkish life. We must take it for granted that it{20}
began with such changes as were easiest; if so, its
failure in these small matters suggests how little
ground there is for hope of success in other
advances more important and difficult. Every
one knows that in the details of dress, carriage,{25}
and general manners, the Turks are very
different from Europeans: so different, and so
consistently different, that the contrariety would
seem to arise from some difference of essential
principle. "This dissimilitude," says Mr.
Thornton, "which pervades the whole of their habits,
is so general, even in things of apparent
insignificance, as almost to indicate design rather than
accident...."{5}

To learn from others, you must entertain a
respect for them; no one listens to those whom
he contemns. Christian nations make progress
in secular matters, because they are aware they
have many things to learn, and do not mind from{10}
whom they learn them, so that he be able to teach.
It is true that Christianity, as well as
Mahometanism, which imitated it, has its visible polity,
and its universal rule, and its especial
prerogatives and powers and lessons, for its disciples.{15}
But, with a Divine wisdom, and contrary to its
human copyist, it has carefully guarded (if I
may use the expression) against extending its
revelations to any point which would blunt the
keenness of human research or the activity of{20}
human toil. It has taken those matters for its
field in which the human mind, left to itself,
could not profitably exercise itself, or progress,
if it would; it has confined its revelations to the
province of theology, only indirectly touching{25}
on other departments of knowledge, so far as
theological truth accidentally affects them; and
it has shown an equally remarkable care in
preventing the introduction of the spirit of caste
or race into its constitution or administration.{30}
Pure nationalism it abhors; its authoritative
documents pointedly ignore the distinction of
Jew and Gentile, and warn us that the first often
becomes the last; while its subsequent history
has illustrated this great principle, by its awful,
and absolute, and inscrutable, and irreversible{5}
passage from country to country, as its territory
and its home. Such, then, it has been in the
Divine counsels, and such, too, as realized in fact;
but man has ways of his own, and, even before
its introduction into the world, the inspired{10}
announcements, which preceded it, were distorted
by the people to whom they were given, to
minister to views of a very different kind. The
secularized Jews, relying on the supernatural
favors locally and temporally bestowed on{15}
themselves, fell into the error of supposing that a
conquest of the earth was reserved for some mighty
warrior of their own race, and that, in
compensation of the reverses which befell them, they
were to become an imperial nation.{20}

What a contrast is presented to us by these
different ideas of a universal empire! The
distinctions of race are indelible; a Jew cannot
become a Greek, or a Greek a Jew; birth is an
event of past time; according to the Judaizers,{25}
their nation, as a nation, was ever to be
dominant; and all other nations, as such, were
inferior and subject. What was the necessary
consequence? There is nothing men more pride
themselves on than birth, for this very reason,{30}
that it is irrevocable; it can neither be given to
those who have it not, nor taken away from
those who have. The Almighty can do anything
which admits of doing; He can compensate every
evil; but a Greek poet says that there is one
thing impossible to Him—to undo what is{5}
done. Without throwing the thought into a
shape which borders on the profane, we may see
in it the reason why the idea of national power
was so dear and so dangerous to the Jew. It was
his consciousness of inalienable superiority that{10}
led him to regard Roman and Greek, Syrian and
Egyptian, with ineffable arrogance and scorn.
Christians, too, are accustomed to think of those
who are not Christians as their inferiors; but the
conviction which possesses them, that they have{15}
what others have not, is obviously not open to
the temptation which nationalism presents.
According to their own faith, there is no insuperable
gulf between themselves and the rest of mankind;
there is not a being in the whole world but is{20}
invited by their religion to occupy the same
position as themselves, and, did he come, would
stand on their very level, as if he had ever been
there. Such accessions to their body they
continually receive, and they are bound under{25}
obligation of duty to promote them. They never
can pronounce of any one, now external to them,
that he will not some day be among them; they
never can pronounce of themselves that, though
they are now within, they may not some day{30}
be found outside, the Divine polity. Such are
the sentiments inculcated by Christianity, even
in the contemplation of the very superiority
which it imparts; even there it is a principle, not
of repulsion between man and man, but of good
fellowship; but as to subjects of secular{5}
knowledge, since here it does not arrogate any
superiority at all, it has in fact no tendency whatever
to center its disciple's contemplation on himself,
or to alienate him from his kind. He readily
acknowledges and defers to the superiority in{10}
art or science of those, if so be, who are
unhappily enemies to Christianity. He admits the
principle of progress on all matters of knowledge
and conduct on which the Creator has not decided
the truth already by revealing it; and he is at{15}
all times ready to learn, in those merely secular
matters, from those who can teach him best.
Thus it is that Christianity, even negatively, and
without contemplating its positive influences, is
the religion of civilization.{20}

III. UNIVERSITIES

What is a University?

If I were asked to describe as briefly and
popularly as I could, what a University was, I
should draw my answer from its ancient
designation of a Studium Generale, or "School of
Universal Learning." This description implies{5}
the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one
spot—from all parts; else, how will you find
professors and students for every department of
knowledge? and in one spot; else, how can there
be any school at all? Accordingly, in its simple{10}
and rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge
of every kind, consisting of teachers and learners
from every quarter. Many things are requisite
to complete and satisfy the idea embodied in this
description; but such as this a University seems{15}
to be in its essence, a place for the
communication and circulation of thought, by means of
personal intercourse, through a wide extent of
country.

Mutual education, in a large sense of the word,{20}
is one of the great and incessant occupations of
human society, carried on partly with set
purpose, and partly not. One generation forms
another; and the existing generation is ever
acting and reacting upon itself in the persons of its
individual members. Now, in this process, books,
I need scarcely say, that is, the litera scripta,
are one special instrument. It is true; and{5}
emphatically so in this age. Considering the
prodigious powers of the press, and how they are
developed at this time in the never intermitting
issue of periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, works in
series, and light literature, we must allow there{10}
never was a time which promised fairer for
dispensing with every other means of information
and instruction. What can we want more, you
will say, for the intellectual education of the
whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant{15}
and diversified and persistent a promulgation
of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask,
need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge
comes down to us? The Sibyl wrote her
prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and wasted{20}
them; but here such careless profusion might be
prudently indulged, for it can be afforded
without loss, in consequence of the almost fabulous
fecundity of the instrument which these latter
ages have invented. We have sermons in stones,{25}
and books in the running brooks; works larger
and more comprehensive than those which have
gained for ancients an immortality, issue forth
every morning, and are projected onwards to
the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of{30}
miles a day. Our seats are strewed, our pavements
are powdered, with swarms of little tracts;
and the very bricks of our city walls preach
wisdom, by informing us by their placards where we
can at once cheaply purchase it.

I allow all this, and much more; such{5}
certainly is our popular education, and its effects are
remarkable. Nevertheless, after all, even in this
age, whenever men are really serious about
getting what, in the language of trade, is called "a
good article," when they aim at something{10}
precise, something refined, something really
luminous, something really large, something choice,
they go to another market; they avail themselves,
in some shape or other, of the rival method, the
ancient method, of oral instruction, of present{15}
communication between man and man, of teachers
instead of learning, of the personal influence of a
master, and the humble initiation of a disciple,
and, in consequence, of great centers of
pilgrimage and throng, which such a method of {20}
education necessarily involves.

If the actions of men may be taken as any test
of their convictions, then we have reason for
saying this, viz.: that the province and the
inestimable benefit of the litera scripta is that of{25}
being a record of truth, and an authority of appeal,
and an instrument of teaching in the hands of a
teacher; but that, if we wish to become exact and
fully furnished in any branch of knowledge which
is diversified and complicated, we must consult {30}
the living man and listen to his living voice....
No book can convey the special spirit and
delicate peculiarities of its subject with that
rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy
of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look,
the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions{5}
thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied
turns of familiar conversation. But I am already
dwelling too long on what is but an incidental
portion of my main subject. Whatever be the
cause, the fact is undeniable. The general{10}
principles of any study you may learn by books at
home; but the detail, the color, the tone, the
air, the life which makes it live in us, you must
catch all these from those in whom it lives
already. You must imitate the student in French{15}
or German, who is not content with his
grammar, but goes to Paris or Dresden: you must
take example from the young artist, who aspires
to visit the great Masters in Florence and in
Rome. Till we have discovered some{20}
intellectual daguerreotype, which takes off the course of
thought, and the form, lineaments, and features
of truth, as completely and minutely, as the
optical instrument reproduces the sensible
object, we must come to the teachers of wisdom{25}
to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain,
and drink there. Portions of it may go from
thence to the ends of the earth by means of
books; but the fullness is in one place alone. It
is in such assemblages and congregations of{30}
intellect that books themselves, the masterpieces
of human genius, are written, or at least
originated.

The principle on which I have been insisting
is so obvious, and instances in point are so ready,
that I should think it tiresome to proceed with{5}
the subject, except that one or two illustrations
may serve to explain my own language about it,
which may not have done justice to the doctrine
which it has been intended to enforce.

For instance, the polished manners and{10}
high-bred bearing which are so difficult of attainment,
and so strictly personal when attained,—which
are so much admired in society, from society
are acquired. All that goes to constitute a
gentleman,—the carriage, gait, address, gestures,{15}
voice; the ease, the self-possession, the courtesy,
the power of conversing, the talent of not
offending; the lofty principle, the delicacy of thought,
the happiness of expression, the taste and
propriety, the generosity and forbearance, the{20}
candor and consideration, the openness of
hand—these qualities, some of them come by nature,
some of them may be found in any rank, some of
them are a direct precept of Christianity; but
the full assemblage of them, bound up in the{25}
unity of an individual character, do we expect
they can be learned from books? are they not
necessarily acquired, where they are to be found,
in high society? The very nature of the case
leads us to say so; you cannot fence without an{30}
antagonist, nor challenge all comers in disputation
before you have supported a thesis; and in
like manner, it stands to reason, you cannot learn
to converse till you have the world to converse
with; you cannot unlearn your natural
bashfulness, or awkwardness, or stiffness, or other{5}
besetting deformity, till you serve your time in
some school of manners. Well, and is it not so
in matter of fact? The metropolis, the court,
the great houses of the land, are the centers to
which at stated times the country comes up, as to{10}
shrines of refinement and good taste; and then
in due time the country goes back again home,
enriched with a portion of the social
accomplishments, which those very visits serve to call out
and heighten in the gracious dispensers of them.{15}
We are unable to conceive how the
"gentleman-like" can otherwise be maintained; and
maintained in this way it is....

Religious teaching itself affords us an
illustration of our subject to a certain point. It{20}
does not indeed seat itself merely in centers of
the world; this is impossible from the nature of
the case. It is intended for the many not the
few; its subject-matter is truth necessary for us,
not truth recondite and rare; but it concurs in{25}
the principle of a University so far as this, that
its great instrument, or rather organ, has ever
been that which nature prescribes in all education,
the personal presence of a teacher, or, in
theological language, Oral Tradition. It is the living{30}
voice, the breathing form, the expressive countenance,
which preaches, which catechises. Truth,
a subtle, invisible, manifold spirit, is poured into
the mind of the scholar by his eyes and ears,
through his affections, imagination, and reason;
it is poured into his mind and is sealed up there{5}
in perpetuity, by propounding and repeating it,
by questioning and requestioning, by correcting
and explaining, by progressing and then recurring
to first principles, by all those ways which are
implied in the word "catechising." In the first{10}
ages, it was a work of long time; months,
sometimes years, were devoted to the arduous task
of disabusing the mind of the incipient Christian
of its pagan errors, and of molding it upon the
Christian faith. The Scriptures indeed were at{15}
hand for the study of those who could avail
themselves of them; but St. Irenæus does not
hesitate to speak of whole races, who had been
converted to Christianity, without being able to
read them. To be unable to read or write was in{20}
those times no evidence of want of learning: the
hermits of the deserts were, in this sense of the
word, illiterate; yet the great St. Anthony,
though he knew not letters, was a match in
disputation for the learned philosophers who came{25}
to try him. Didymus again, the great
Alexandrian theologian, was blind. The ancient
discipline, called the Disciplina Arcani, involved the
same principle. The more sacred doctrines of
Revelation were not committed to books but{30}
passed on by successive tradition. The teaching
on the Blessed Trinity, and the Eucharist
appears to have been so handed down for some
hundred years; and when at length reduced to
writing, it has filled many folios, yet has not been
exhausted.{5}

But I have said more than enough in
illustration; end as I began—a University is a place
of concourse, whither students come from every
quarter for every kind of knowledge. You
cannot have the best of every kind everywhere; you{10}
must go to some great city or emporium for it.
There you have all the choicest productions
of nature and art all together, which you find
each in its own separate place elsewhere. All
the riches of the land, and of the earth, are{15}
carried up thither; there are the best markets, and
there the best workmen. It is the center of
trade, the supreme court of fashion, the umpire
of rival talents, and the standard of things rare
and precious. It is the place for seeing galleries{20}
of first-rate pictures, and for hearing wonderful
voices and performers of transcendent skill. It
is the place for great preachers, great orators,
great nobles, great statesmen. In the nature of
things, greatness and unity go together;{25}
excellence implies a center. And such, for the third
or fourth time, is a University; I hope I do not
weary out the reader by repeating it. It is the
place to which a thousand schools make
contributions; in which the intellect may safely{30}
range and speculate, sure to find its equal in
some antagonist activity, and its judge in the
tribunal of truth. It is a place where inquiry
is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and
perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and
error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind,{5}
and knowledge with knowledge. It is the place
where the professor becomes eloquent, and is a
missionary and a preacher, displaying his science
in its most complete and most winning form,
pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, and{10}
lighting up his own love of it in the breasts of
his hearers. It is the place where the catechist
makes good his ground as he goes, treading in the
truth day by day into the ready memory, and
wedging and tightening it into the expanding{15}
reason. It is a place which wins the admiration
of the young by its celebrity, kindles the
affections of the middle-aged by its beauty, and rivets
the fidelity of the old by its associations. It is a
seat of wisdom, a light of the world, a minister of{20}
the faith, an Alma Mater of the rising generation.
It is this and a great deal more, and demands a
somewhat better head and hand than mine to
describe it well.

University Life: Athens

It has been my desire, were I able, to bring{25}
before the reader what Athens may have been,
viewed as what we have since called a University;
and to do this, not with any purpose of writing
a panegyric on a heathen city, or of denying
its many deformities, or of concealing what was
morally base in what was intellectually great, but
just the contrary, of representing as they really{5}
were; so far, that is, as to enable him to see what
a University is, in the very constitution of society
and in its own idea, what is its nature and object,
and what its needs of aid and support external to
itself to complete that nature and to secure that{10}
object.

So now let us fancy our Scythian, or Armenian,
or African, or Italian, or Gallic student, after
tossing on the Saronic waves, which would be his
more ordinary course to Athens, at last casting{15}
anchor at Piræus. He is of any condition or rank
of life you please, and may be made to order,
from a prince to a peasant. Perhaps he is some
Cleanthes, who has been a boxer in the public
games. How did it ever cross his brain to betake{20}
himself to Athens in search of wisdom? or, if he
came thither by accident, how did the love of it
ever touch his heart? But so it was, to Athens he
came with three drachms in his girdle, and he got
his livelihood by drawing water, carrying loads,{25}
and the like servile occupations. He attached
himself, of all philosophers, to Zeno the
Stoic,—to Zeno, the most high-minded, the most haughty
of speculators; and out of his daily earnings the
poor scholar brought his master the daily sum of{30}
an obolus, in payment for attending his lectures.
Such progress did he make, that on Zeno's death
he actually was his successor in his school; and,
if my memory does not play me false, he is the
author of a hymn to the Supreme Being, which is
one of the noblest effusions of the kind in classical{5}
poetry. Yet, even when he was the head of a
school, he continued in his illiberal toil as if he
had been a monk; and, it is said, that once, when
the wind took his pallium, and blew it aside, he
was discovered to have no other garment at{10}
all—something like the German student who came up
to Heidelberg with nothing upon him but a great
coat and a pair of pistols.

Or it is another disciple of the Porch—Stoic
by nature, earlier than by profession—who is{15}
entering the city; but in what different fashion
he comes! It is no other than Marcus, Emperor
of Rome and philosopher. Professors long since
were summoned from Athens for his service, when
he was a youth, and now he comes, after his {20}
victories in the battlefield, to make his
acknowledgments at the end of life, to the city of wisdom, and
to submit himself to an initiation into the
Eleusinian mysteries.

Or it is a young man of great promise as an{25}
orator, were it not for his weakness of chest, which
renders it necessary that he should acquire the art
of speaking without over-exertion, and should
adopt a delivery sufficient for the display of his
rhetorical talents on the one hand, yet merciful{30}
to his physical resources on the other. He is
called Cicero; he will stop but a short time, and
will pass over to Asia Minor and its cities, before
he returns to continue a career which will render
his name immortal; and he will like his short
sojourn at Athens so well, that he will take good{5}
care to send his son thither at an earlier age than
he visited it himself.

But see where comes from Alexandria (for we
need not be very solicitous about anachronisms),
a young man from twenty to twenty-two, who{10}
has narrowly escaped drowning on his voyage,
and is to remain at Athens as many as eight or
ten years, yet in the course of that time will not
learn a line of Latin, thinking it enough to
become accomplished in Greek composition, and in{15}
that he will succeed. He is a grave person, and
difficult to make out; some say he is a Christian,
something or other in the Christian line his father
is for certain. His name is Gregory, he is by
country a Cappadocian, and will in time become{20}
preëminently a theologian, and one of the
principal Doctors of the Greek Church.

Or it is one Horace, a youth of low stature and
black hair, whose father has given him an
education at Rome above his rank in life, and now is{25}
sending him to finish it at Athens; he is said to
have a turn for poetry: a hero he is not, and it
were well if he knew it; but he is caught by the
enthusiasm of the hour, and goes off campaigning
with Brutus and Cassius, and will leave his shield{30}
behind him on the field of Philippi.

Or it is a mere boy of fifteen: his name
Eunapius; though the voyage was not long, sea
sickness, or confinement, or bad living on board the
vessel, threw him into a fever, and, when the
passengers landed in the evening at Piræus, he{5}
could not stand. His countrymen who
accompanied him, took him up among them and carried
him to the house of the great teacher of the day,
Proæresius, who was a friend of the captain's,
and whose fame it was which drew the{10}
enthusiastic youth to Athens. His companions
understand the sort of place they are in, and, with the
license of academic students, they break into the
philosopher's house, though he appears to have
retired for the night, and proceed to make {15}
themselves free of it, with an absence of ceremony,
which is only not impudence, because Proæresius
takes it so easily. Strange introduction for our
stranger to a seat of learning, but not out of
keeping with Athens; for what could you expect of a{20}
place where there was a mob of youths and not
even the pretense of control; where the poorer
lived any how, and got on as they could, and the
teachers themselves had no protection from the
humors and caprices of the students who filled{25}
their lecture halls? However, as to this
Eunapius, Proæresius took a fancy to the boy, and told
him curious stories about Athenian life. He
himself had come up to the University with one
Hephæstion, and they were even worse off than{30}
Cleanthes the Stoic; for they had only one cloak
between them, and nothing whatever besides,
except some old bedding; so when Proæresius
went abroad, Hephæstion lay in bed, and
practiced himself in oratory; and then Hephæstion
put on the cloak, and Proæresius crept under the{5}
coverlet. At another time there was so fierce
a feud between what would be called "town and
gown" in an English University, that the
Professors did not dare lecture in public, for fear of
ill treatment.{10}

But a freshman like Eunapius soon got
experience for himself of the ways and manners
prevalent in Athens. Such a one as he had hardly
entered the city, when he was caught hold of by
a party of the academic youth, who proceeded to{15}
practice on his awkwardness and his ignorance.
At first sight one wonders at their childishness;
but the like conduct obtained in the mediæval
Universities; and not many months have passed
away since the journals have told us of sober{20}
Englishmen, given to matter-of-fact calculations,
and to the anxieties of money making, pelting
each other with snowballs on their own sacred
territory, and defying the magistracy, when they
would interfere with their privileges of{25}
becoming boys. So I suppose we must attribute it to
something or other in human nature. Meanwhile,
there stands the newcomer, surrounded by a circle
of his new associates, who forthwith proceed to
frighten, and to banter, and to make a fool of him,{30}
to the extent of their wit. Some address him with
mock politeness, others with fierceness; and so
they conduct him in solemn procession across the
Agora to the Baths; and as they approach, they
dance about him like madmen. But this was to
be the end of his trial, for the Bath was a sort of{5}
initiation; he thereupon received the pallium, or
University gown, and was suffered by his
tormentors to depart in peace. One alone is
recorded as having been exempted from this
persecution; it was a youth graver and loftier than{10}
even St. Gregory himself: but it was not from his
force of character, but at the instance of Gregory,
that he escaped. Gregory was his bosom friend,
and was ready in Athens to shelter him when
he came. It was another Saint and Doctor; the{15}
great Basil, then, (it would appear,) as Gregory,
but a catechumen of the Church.

But to return to our freshman. His troubles
are not at an end, though he has got his gown
upon him. Where is he to lodge? whom is he{20}
to attend? He finds himself seized, before he
well knows where he is, by another party of men
or three or four parties at once, like foreign
porters at a landing, who seize on the baggage of the
perplexed stranger, and thrust half a dozen cards{25}
into his unwilling hands. Our youth is plied by
the hangers-on of professor this, or sophist that,
each of whom wishes the fame or the profit of
having a houseful. We will say that he escapes
from their hands,—but then he will have to{30}
choose for himself where he will put up; and, to
tell the truth, with all the praise I have already
given, and the praise I shall have to give, to
the city of mind, nevertheless, between ourselves,
the brick and wood which formed it, the actual
tenements, where flesh and blood had to lodge{5}
(always excepting the mansions of great men of
the place), do not seem to have been much better
than those of Greek or Turkish towns, which are
at this moment a topic of interest and ridicule
in the public prints. A lively picture has lately{10}
been set before us of Gallipoli. Take, says the
writer,[41] a multitude of the dilapidated outhouses
found in farm-yards in England, of the rickety
old wooden tenements, the cracked, shutterless
structures of planks and tiles, the sheds and stalls,{15}
which our bye lanes, or fish-markets, or
river-sides can supply; tumble them down on the
declivity of a bare bald hill; let the spaces
between house and house, thus accidentally
determined, be understood to form streets, winding of{20}
course for no reason, and with no meaning, up and
down the town; the roadway always narrow, the
breadth never uniform, the separate houses
bulging or retiring below, as circumstances may have
determined, and leaning forward till they meet{25}
overhead—and you have a good idea of
Gallipoli. I question whether this picture would
not nearly correspond to the special seat of the
Muses in ancient times. Learned writers assure
us distinctly that the houses of Athens were for{30}
the most part small and mean; that the streets
were crooked and narrow; that the upper stories
projected over the roadway; and that staircases,
balustrades, and doors that opened outwards
obstructed it—a remarkable coincidence of{5}
description. I do not doubt at all, though
history is silent, that that roadway was jolting to
carriages, and all but impassable; and that it
was traversed by drains, as freely as any Turkish
town now. Athens seems in these respects to{10}
have been below the average cities of its time.
"A stranger," says an ancient, "might doubt, on
the sudden view, if really he saw Athens."