"A stranger," says an ancient, "might doubt, on the sudden view, if really he saw Athens." [41] Mr. Russell's Letters in the _Times_ newspaper (1854). I grant all this, and much more, if you will; but, recollect, Athens was the home of the 15 intellectual and beautiful; not of low mechanical contrivances and material organization. Why stop within your lodgings counting the rents in your wall or the holes in your tiling, when nature and art call you away? You must put up with 20 such a chamber, and a table, and a stool, and a sleeping board, anywhere else in the three continents; one place does not differ from another indoors; your magalia in Africa, or your grottoes in Syria are not perfection. I suppose you did 25 not come to Athens to swarm up a ladder, or to grope about a closet: you came to see and to hear, what hear and see you could not elsewhere. What food for the intellect is it possible to procure indoors, that you stay there looking about 30 you? do you think to read there? where are your books? do you expect to purchase books at Athens--you are much out in your calculations. True it is, we at this day, who live in the nineteenth century, have the books of Greece as a perpetual memorial; and copies there have been, 5 since the time that they were written; but you need not go to Athens to procure them, nor would you find them in Athens. Strange to say, strange to the nineteenth century, that in the age of Plato and Thucydides, there was not, it is said, a 10 bookshop in the whole place; nor was the book trade in existence till the very time of Augustus. Libraries, I suspect, were the bright invention of Attalus or the Ptolemies;[42] I doubt whether Athens had a library till the reign of Hadrian. 15 It was what the student gazed on, what he heard, what he caught by the magic of sympathy, not what he read, which was the education furnished by Athens. [42] I do not go into controversy on the subject, for which the reader must have recourse to Lipsius, Morhof, Boeckh, Bekker, etc.; and this of course applies to whatever historical matter I introduce, or shall introduce.