Every part of the system tends to debauch their morals, and deaden their intellectual perceptions, and there are some parts of it that tend strongly to make them as impertinent as they are ill-informed. With many of them, and more especially with those connected with the law, public speaking, or rather public wrangling, such as they daily hear before their Lordships, is regarded as the foremost and best of all qualifications. Accordingly, they not only have little disputing societies, at which the most profound and grave questions are discussed and decided in the least grave and profound manner, but they also, not sometimes, but very frequently, carry the same practices into their carousing parties, whether in their own lodgings or at their respective ale-houses. Thus they learn to make speeches, which, like inflated bladders, are of a considerable size, and smooth withal on the surface, but have neither solidity nor weight. Of those who are thus educated, a considerable portion are scattered over the country, and perhaps in this way the Athens draws both upon the virtue and the intelligence of the age, in full for all that she gives in the way of other education. Perhaps, indeed, setting aside the political taints which have been noted as emanating from the Athens, it were just as well for Scotland, and not a bit worse for England, that Athenian education of all kinds were confined between the Loch of Duddingstone and the Water of Leith. Of those again who are thus educated, and who remain in the Athens, it may perhaps be said that they turn round and inflict upon those who come after, full retribution for what those who went before inflicted upon themselves; and that with all her boasted elegance and taste, there is perhaps no city in which vice is more generally or more obtrusively practised, than in this self-boasted model of taste and purity. The effects of this system of education may be traced in the manners, and especially in the conversation, of the Athenians, even when they have, as one would suppose, risen above the standard and outlived the vices of those juvenile associations. The jokes which are quoted as being the indigenous crop of the Parliament-House habitually, and even of the bench occasionally, have almost uniformly a latitude in them, which would not be tolerated in similar places elsewhere; and perhaps one of the most offensive collections that could be raked together, would be a list of all the good things with which the Athenians embellish their conversations, as having been said and done by the men of whom they boast; but as such a collection would be relished no where except in the Athens, and with Athenian disciples, it may, with great propriety, be left as a chosen preserve, in which her own literati may poach, when otherwise their stores become exhausted, as must occasionally be the case even with them.