“Register’d to fame eternal,
In deathless pages of diurnal;”
Yet even this would not have succeeded with the public generally, at any period, and it perhaps could have had less chance at no period than it has at present, when the rapid spread of intercourse and information is, in spite of all official and other efforts to the contrary, diffusing a more rational taste even down to the very humblest classes of society. Men in office, however inferior and second-rate that office may be, and however mean may be their own tastes, and grovelling their own habits, will not—dare not, continue long to pride themselves in, or even privately to encourage, that from which the peasantry turn away in disgust; and, ere many additional years have been added to the Kalendar, it will be found that those superior spirits who lent themselves to this work for a time, in the hope that it would serve them as a stepping-stone for getting into office, will become ashamed of it in consequence of having obtained their objects, or disgusted, because that which they must have felt as a degradation, has to them, also, proved a deception.
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merit nor the demerit of originating that school; and if all support, except what the Athens could give it, were to be withdrawn, the remainder of its existence would not exceed one month.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
————————“delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of the thick-ribb’d ice,”—
was reported to me, (for I did not then see him,) not exactly
“To be imprisoned in the viewless wind,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world,”
but to have made one of the most singular experiments upon the said winds themselves, that ever entered into a philosophic head. This learned personage, whom the Athenian magistrates had at one time refused to expel from the city “cum avisamento eorum ministrorum,” upon the alleged ground of his being a conjuror, had made long and laborious experiments in all sorts of heating and cooling, physical and metaphysical. When other matters and fires were nearly exhausted with him, it struck him that it would excite mortal wonder, and win immortal renown, if he could bring atmospheric air to a red heat. He foresaw, that if he should succeed in this experiment, it would be farewell to both gas and steam; and there would be no need of dangerous boilers, castiron pipes, smoking chimneys, and all the other casualties of the new power and the new light. If this degree of temperature could be communicated to the atmosphere, the fondest dreams of mankind would be realized,—the midnight air might be rendered more glorious than the sun; winter might be driven within the polar circle; the precinct of the Holyrood might be made fragrant with spices, and fat with olives; and the vine might clothe the now naked crags, green with never-fading leaves, and purple with perennial grapes. That which promised so many and so delightful advantages was worth trying, and so the philosophic personage is reported to have gone about his experiment in this wise:—
He procured a bagpipe; and having dissected away the chanter, the drones, and the bellows,—making the stumps secure with ligatures, he carried the inflated bag to a neighbouring barn, and set two brawny peasants a-threshing it with their flails, while he stood by, wishing and wondering as to the result. What that result was, I was unable to learn, and indeed I made not much inquiry respecting it,—and I mention it only as one of the many instances in which I heard the Athenians boast of their philosophy.