But, whatever of good or of evil, of liveliness or of licentiousness, of the misapplication of talent, or the miserable labour of that which is no talent at all, may be found in the school of writing, of which Blackwood’s Magazine hitherto forms the chief specimen, the Athens assuredly has neither the merit nor the demerit of originating that school; and if all support, except what the Athens could give it, were to be withdrawn, the remainder of its existence would not exceed one month.
Having heard a great deal about the intellectuality of the Athens, and its superiority in genius, in taste, and in literature, above every other city in the world, I made a point of examining, with all the care and candour that I could exercise. I began too, with a strong, yes, a very strong prejudice in its favour; for it had been rung again and again in my ears, that, compared with what was to be found here, the whole world beside was an empire of dulness. But my fond, and as it proved to be my foolish prejudice, became less and less, at every step; and, whether I would or not, I was compelled to see, that the greater part of the name which somehow or other the Athens has gotten, has been gotten through the unceasing brazen-frontedness of her own self-idolatry. In various parts of the Athens, I found men _pirouetting_ in small evolutions of what they call philosophy. One, for instance, worshipping the wings of a butterfly; and another drawing lines and circles upon a human skull, and measuring the talents and propensities of the unknown owner very gravely with a pair of compasses and scale; a third, taking up the visions of Robert Owen of New Lanark, was bewildering himself in an attempt so to arrange the human race, as that the square of the oblique diagonal of conduct should be equal to the two squares of the base of nature, and the perpendicular of education; a fourth was proving by coal and limestone, that the globe had been boiled; and a fifth, by porphyry and basalt, that it had been roasted. One learned professor, the very apex of the triangle of the Athenian science,--who, in his time, has tested hell, as it were--has, in the ardour of his inquiries after and into things hot and cold, alternately deputed his