dissenting ministers is always a sort of love-lane, in which a lady may at least gather the dry stalks of those flowers which she neglected to pull while they were in season. But in the Athens they go another way to work,--they dip their stockings in heaven’s azure, pass through the hoops of small philosophy to the heaven-ward attic, (from which, perchance, the Athens takes its name,) and thence launch the bolts of their criticism against all the world below--that is, all the world of their own sex, and below their own age. Thus have I with, as an Athenian _Literatus_ would say, “the softest feather dipt in mildest ink” and with uniform watchfulness against unmerited praise and undeserved censure, noted down a few of those features and traits which stamp upon the Modern Athens, the isolation and individuality of her character, as she stands away from other cities, and appears in herself. Had I followed her own _modus operandi_,--had I torn in pieces the private characters of all to whom I found it necessary to advert for the purposes of illustration, and sported with the mangled fragments in the open streets,--had I dug into their family vaults, and wantonly exposed the bones of their ancestors to the gaze of every passer by,--and had I set the signet of my approbation or disapprobation upon them, not on account of what they were in themselves, but of whence they sprung, what they possessed, and how they were connected,--then, assuredly, the spirit of my writing would have been more in accordance with the Athenian spirit, and I would have been loved, lauded, and adopted as a worthy and hopeful son of the aspiring attic of the _Græcia mendax_. But such honour is not my ambition; and therefore my study has been to describe things with all the simplicity of truth, and, as in whatever bearing the semblance of censure I have written, I have wished and attempted to be corrective rather than caustic--to go to the causes of evil rather than to play with the symptoms of it, I must conclude, that if any shall blame me for the freedom of my words, they must do it because their hearts are smitten, and not because their deeds are misrepresented. The Athens boasts of herself as a model of elegance and of taste: I found her a compound of squalour and of vulgarity. She boasts of her philosophy: I found it pursuing thistle-down over the wilderness. She boasts of her literary spirit: I found her literature a mere disjointed skeleton, or rather the cast-skin of a toothless serpent. She boasts of her public spirit: I found almost every man pursuing his own petty interests, by the most sinister and contemptible means; and, perchance, the most noisy of her patriots standing open-mouthed, if so that the very smallest fragment of place or pension might drop into them. She boasts of the encouragements that she has given to genius: I looked into the record, and I found that every man of genius who had depended upon her patronage, had been debauched and starved.