But if they have no literary men, as such, of whom they can boast, they have about as little title to put on airs about their literary taste. In that, as well as in all other matters, they are idolaters; and it may be truly said of them, as was said of the people of the elder Athens, that the most conspicuous of their altars is “to the Unknown God.” So long as Jeffrey was deemed infallible, they ventured no opinion upon any point, until they knew how he had delivered himself. When, for instance, he had, as he thought, blasted the laurels of Byron in the bud, the cry that ran through the Athens was, “What a silly fool to attempt to write poetry? But the Review has done his business. He will write no more at any rate.” When the retribution of the “Scotch Reviewers” was hurled back, the worshippers of the Athens were astonished, but they said nothing. The fact is, that they neither have opinions of their own in such matters, nor have they leisure to form them.
The observations which I had occasion to make respecting the dramatic taste of the Athenians are equally applicable to their taste, not only in literature, but in every thing else. In youth their education is too superficial, and when they grow up, the drudgery of the law, to which so many of them are doomed, and which influences the habits of the whole, together with that dissipation in which they indulge as habitually and more deeply than any people with whom I am acquainted, give a turn to their minds which is the very opposite of literary. These causes will be more fully developed in the following chapter; but there is one fact which is very remarkable, which the Athenians themselves may as well be left to explain. Of the men who, from time to time, have become illustrious in the Athens for their scientific or literary attainments, hardly one has been born, and very few have been educated, within her walls. They have almost uniformly been provincial Scotchmen, and not a few of them have been students at the provincial universities. So that while the Athens has not much to boast of in the literary way, the little of which she can boast is not wholly her own. Perhaps this is another of the desolations of the widowed metropolis.
CHAPTER IX.
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.