teacher could often command one hundred pupils, even though the course occupied more than one year, the endowment was considerable. The desire of procuring free education for poorer lads with literary tastes is, however, an interesting and permanent feature in the Greek mind. At the present moment the University of Athens provides free education for every Greek, and is wholly supported by a State subsidy. This now unique provision brings to Athens an influx of young Greeks from all the Levant, from Turkish countries, from Egypt--nay, even from Italy. They support themselves as best they can, often by menial employments, provided they can keep their lecture hours free. Lodging together in the humblest apartments, they club their scanty earnings for the purchase of a light and a text-book, which they use in common, the one sleeping till his fellow has done his work, and wakes him to hand him the fresh-trimmed lamp and well-worn manual. This state of things, which reminds us so strongly of the mediæval universities, and is inestimably honorable to a growing age of culture when the masses want leavening, may be driven to a dangerous excess when the educated classes become too numerous; for it dissuades every ambitious young man from agriculture and the commercial pursuits so necessary to a nation’s welfare. And as this is the case in Greece now, so it was doubtless the case when, in the days of Hellenism, Athens offered philosophy at so cheap a rate to all the Greek-speaking world. The class of learned idlers who would not pursue any mercantile calling increased throughout Greece.[62] Although, therefore, the condition of things at Oxford and Cambridge--which, in addition to their vast endowments, demands a heavy outlay from their alumni--is not to be defended, there is an opposite error, and one likely to do more mischief: it is the setting-up of the lower classes to seek university degrees with a minimum of expense and trouble, and consequently a minimum of culture. This mistaken course, which now threatens the Irish people, in addition to all their other misfortunes, tends strongly to increase (as is the case in modern Greece) a dangerous class of social and political malcontents, who consider that their high education is not recognized, and that they have no scope for their literary or political talents.[63]