It must be allowed that, if its patronage were at all in decent hands, the constitution of the Athenian university is not bad. The salaries of the professors are all so small that if the livings are worth the acceptance of men of talent, they must be chiefly made up of the small annual fees payable by the students. This is a very wholesome plan, and tends more to reward every one according to his real merits than that which obtains at most other places. The patronage, however, with the three elements of civil ignorance, political influence, and clerical intrigue, arranged against the single and undefined good of the institution, is more than enough to paralyze all the good which that principle, properly supported, or even let alone, would be capable of effecting. Those evils have begun to pervade the whole system. As the Athens is the grand seat of lawyers, there will always be students for the law classes, increasing with the increase that there is for lawyers; but in every thing else the poison of decay has been infused, and the decay itself has become visible. With the exception of Leslie, who has written some very flaming articles in the Edinburgh Review, and some books in which the path to geometry is made a little more thorny than ever; of Jamieson, who has been most learned on slate and granite; and Wilson, who has indited some pretty lake poetry, and some pitiful political prose, of which he is said to be now highly ashamed,--I did not hear that any of the Athenian professors have put in a single claim for immortality. Even in her anatomical school, that upon which she rested her fame the longest and the most securely, the recent falling off has been great; and of all those who now shine in the lists of her _senatus_ there is none able to hold the book for Gregory, or the scalpel for old Monro, or light the furnace for Black. I understand that for the fragments of her medical school that remain, the Athens is almost wholly dependant upon private lecturers; that the students pay their fees and enter their names at the college, not with any view of attending the classes there, but because the fees and entries are necessary for the ceremony of graduation. But for the celebrity of her professors, the Athens possesses no advantages as the locality of a medical school. From the nature and pursuits of the Athenian society, there is neither that variety of patients, nor that variety of cases, which is found in cities even of equal population, where a large portion of the people are engaged in manufactures. That it is as good in this respect as Glasgow begins to be doubted, as a considerable number of medical students now attend the Glasgow college in preference; and that it is any way comparable to London, as a school of surgery, no one can suppose. If the medical glory of the Athenian college continue to decrease as it has done for some time, that college will soon become, like the Athens herself, a pensionary upon the law