It is melancholy to observe what a small, mean, precarious, grudging support we give to the best things, if they are of the kind which must be sustained out of our surplus. At Cambridge the other day, while looking about among the ancient barracks in which the students live, I had the curiosity to ask concerning the salaries of the professors in Harvard College,--supposing, of course, that such learned and eminent persons received a compensation proportioned to the dignity of their offices, the importance of their labors, and the celebrity of their names. Alas! it is not so. A good reporter on the New York press gets just about as much money as the President of the College, and the professors receive such salaries as fifteen and eighteen hundred dollars a year. The very gifts of inconsiderate benefactors have impoverished the college, few of whom, it seems, have been able to give money to the institution; most of them have merely bought distinction from it. Thus professorships in plenty have been endowed and named; but the college is hampered, and its resources have become insufficient, by being divided among a multitude of objects. I beg the reader, the next time he gives Harvard University a hundred thousand dollars, or leaves it a million in his will, to make the sum a gift,--a gift to the trustees,--to be expended as they deem best for the general and permanent good of the institution, and not to neutralize the benefit of the donation by conditions dictated by vanity. Yale, I have since learned, is no better off. At all our colleges, it seems, the professors either starve upon twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, or eke out a subsistence by taking pupils, or by some other arduous extra labor. But what wonder that learning pines, when we every year waste millions upon millions of the fund out of which alone learning can be supported!