In addition to this, in as far as the university is concerned, there is the infliction of perhaps the very worst patronage that could be devised or even imagined. I have noticed already, what a precious piece of work the corporations, or, as they are termed, “the councils” of the royal burghs are in Scotland. In itself, there is nothing to render that of the Athens better than any of the others; and, in close juxtaposition with it, there is something which tends to make it worse. The whole town-councils in Scotland are, their attention to their own personal interests excepted, ignorant, unreasoning, and passive tools in the hands of the ruling faction. If the actual leaders of that faction have not their actual residence in the Athens, it is there that they find the hands which do their work. Those hands belong to men, who not only have a better education than the Athenian magistrates, but who perform more important functions, and perform them in the face, and for the weal or the woe of the whole of Scotland. To them, therefore, the magistrates of the Athens are inferior; and this circumstance, taken in conjunction with the inferiority which the whole system of the Scotch burghs tends to stamp upon the magistrates, renders the said civic rulers of the Athens the most unfit patrons of a school of philosophy, or indeed of any thing learned or liberal, that human imagination could devise. Not only this; but the superior talents, at least the superior pretensions, of the other functionaries alluded to, will throw the civic worthies into their train as followers; and thus, whatever patronage they exercise, will have to sustain, in addition to their own sheer dulness, the dead deadening weight of the party politics of the country,--a combination of stupidity and slavery, under which that system were either greater or less than human, which could flourish in a rational and liberal manner.