It is to this education, for life and not for literature, which I mean chiefly to advert in this chapter. Still, it may not be amiss to give a preliminary glance at the school education, not of the Athens merely, but of Scotland generally, because on that, it strikes me, Englishmen might find something both to learn and to imitate. The idea of having one or more schools in each parish, so established that no teacher can be appointed to them who is not well educated, and so endowed that they can never be corrupted as the free-schools so frequently are in England, or confined to the most opulent classes of society, as the better class of schools are in that country, is one of the best that ever entered into the imagination of any legislature. Even in the remotest and most thinly-inhabited parish of Scotland, the schoolmaster is a man of real information: not unfrequently the son of humble parents, who, finding that he evinced talents and a taste for learning, sent him to school, and to some one or other of those cheap universities in Scotland, where, judging from the number of illustrious names that they can boast of, learning is nothing the worse for its cheapness, till he was qualified for orders; but who, finding his influence insufficient for procuring him the ease and indolence of a parsonage, took, as his only alternative, the humbler and more laborious, but unquestionably more useful, office of parish schoolmaster. Young men of this description are one of the greatest blessings that a country can possess, and rather than that Scotland should lose them, it were more for her welfare that all the boasted philosophy, and all the brawling law of the Athens were at the bottom of the sea. They may be said not only to pursue learning for its own sake, and without any view either to honour or emolument, but also to follow the profession of teachers from the same disinterested motives. Since professions more lofty and lucrative than that of minister of the Scotch Kirk monopolized the sons of the wealthier Scotch--since the free sons of the mountains went to practise slavery in the west, and those of the plains to get wealth and liver complaints in the east, the ecclesiastical offices in Scotland have been almost exclusively filled by the sons of the poor. These almost invariably pass a part of their early life either as parochial schoolmasters or as tutors in private families. The tutors are those who have the best connexion, the most ambition, and the most fawning and obsequious habits. They are menial servants, and with the education of gentlemen they are sent to companion with butlers and valets, to humour the caprices of wayward children, and to hear the fooleries of booby “lairds,” and the scorn of assuming dames, who can see no merit but in being connected with this, that, or the other family, which has borne the same name, and inhabited the same lands since the first introduction of crows and cow-stealing.