await in every part of the country the robust arm of industry for their cultivation. The Greeks, indeed, have not all the virtues of freemen; perhaps they are never destined to exhibit them. Like the Muscovites, and from the same cause, they are often cunning, fraudulent, deceitful; slaves always are such; and a nation is not crushed by a thousand years of Byzantine despotism, and four hundred of Mahommedan oppression, without having some of the features of the servile character impressed upon it. But they exhibit also the cheering symptoms of social improvement; they have proved they still possess the qualities to which their ancestors' greatness was owing. They are lively, ardent, and persevering, passionately desirous of knowledge, and indefatigable in the pursuit of it. The whole life which yet animates the Ottoman Empire is owing to their intelligence and activity. The stagnation of despotism is unknown among them; if the union of civilisation is unhappily equally unknown, that is a virtue of the manhood, and not to be looked for in the infancy of nations. The consciousness of deficiencies is the first step to their removal; the pride of barbarism, the self-sufficiency of ignorance, is the real bar to improvement; and a nation which is capable of making the efforts for improvement which the Greeks are doing, if not in possession of political greatness, is on the road to it."

Now, to the first proposition contained in the above remarks, that the Great Powers were perfectly justified in their intervention to save the Greeks from the lawless ferocity of the Turks, we have no objections to offer. It is a gladdening thing to believe and to see that the strong cry of human sympathy will sometimes be listened to even by politicians, and that heartless diplomacy in the public intercourse between people and people is not all in all. But the summary expulsion of the Turks from European Turkey, even supposing it were not too great a punishment for the offence, would, when achieved, leave the most difficult part of the Greek problem unsolved. Sir Archibald assumes that the discordant and crude elements of which European Turkey, less the Turks, is composed, would, in 1827, have readily coalesced, or is ready now, in 1854, to coalesce, into a great Greek empire, of which Constantinople shall be the capital. That the Greeks themselves should

believe this is natural; that Sir Archibald Alison should believe it, carried away by a noble sympathy with a heroic theme, is but the radiation of that fire with which the noblest minds burn most intensely; but we have never conversed with an individual practically conversant with the elements of which Christian Turkey is composed, who looked upon such a consummation, in the present age at least, as possible. A very intelligent and patriotic Greek gentleman once remarked in our hearing, that the Greek kingdom could never prosper in its present tiny dimensions; that the Greek Islands-except Corcyra, which the English must keep as a naval station-with Thessaly, and part of Thrace and Macedonia, must be added to it before it could be free from that spirit of petty intrigue which is the great vice of small governments. This is intelligible; because the population included under such an extended Greek kingdom would, by a great predominance both of numbers and moral forces, be essentially Greek. But when it is proposed seriously to revive a Byzantine empire, Greek merely in name, and comprising such large sections of a non-Hellenic population as Servia, for instance, and Bulgaria, then, we confess, we feel staggered; and all the historic analogies which Sir Archibald Alison so skilfully presses into his service will not give wings to our drooping faith. The best-instructed man with whom we ever conversed on the subject-Dr George Finlay, who has lived among the Greeks all his lifedeclares that such a combination is impossible: the principle of cohesion is too weak, that of repulsion too strong: the splendid aggregate would fall to pieces in a few years; and out of the confused elements a new compulsory crystallisation take place under the influence- very likely-of Russian polarity. Sir Archibald Alison himself, in one of the phrases which he accidentally drops, seems to admit the truth of this view. "Diversity of race," he says, "so far from being an element of weakness, is, when duly coerced, the most prolific source of strength." Very true, when duly coerced; but it is this very principle of coercion that would not exist in the supposed Byzantine empire; and

could exist only, according to one of Sir A. Alison's own analogies, through the violent subjection of all the other races by the one that happened to be strongest; for so it was, as Livy shows in bloody detail, that the different races of Italy were coerced into a grand national unity by the Roman Latins. But even after all that bloody cementing, the aggregate of the Italian States, as no one knows better than Sir Archibald Alison, was kept together by the loosest possible cohesion; as the terrible outburst of the Marsic or Social war testifies, which wellnigh split Italy into two, at a time when Julius Cæsar, its future master, had not yet begun to trim his beard. He certainly, the lion, and his nephew Augustus, the fox after him, did use the bloody cement successfully, and exercised a strong coercion, the effect of which is visible even now among the again-divided possessors of the Italian soil; such a coercion as the present Czar of Russia might perhaps at the present moment be in the fair way of exercising for the sake of the Orthodox Church, had Sir Archibald Alison's Byzantine empire been patched together with a few purple rags in the year 1828. Or again, to take another of his analogies, has Sir Archibald Alison forgotten what was the state of Greece, not anterior to, but immediately after the Persian invasion ?-did it not plunge at once into all the pettiness of provincial rivalry? and was not the great Peloponnesian war a speaking proof, that there were no elements of cohesion even among pure Greeks, and in the best days of Greece, strong enough to keep that unfortunate country from consuming its own vitals in civil war, and becoming, by voluntary self-betrayal, first the scoff of the Persian, and then the prey of the Macedonian? With these examples before us, we cannot but consider ourselves more near the truth in following the practical statesmen who declared that the new Greek kingdom should be confined within the limits where the insurrection had chiefly raged, and where the battle had been fought. Sober politicians could not but look upon the whole affair as experimental; and whatever arguments may in the course of events be advanced for an expan

sion of the limits of the existing monarchy, no person practically acquainted with the events of Greek government, or rather misgovernment, since the creation of Otho's kingdom in 1832, can imagine that the evils under which the country has groaned would have been less, had Thessaly and Macedonia been at that time included within the Hellenic border. We should still have had German bureaucracy, French constitutionalism, Fanariote intrigue, Etolian brigandage, and modern diplomacy, thrown together to brew a devil's soup of jobbery, and falsehood, and feebleness, over which the wisest man can only hold up his hands, and with a hopeless wonderment exclaim

"Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!

66

In conclusion, we need hardly say that we cannot agree with Sir A. Alison when he states, so strongly as he does in the last paragraph, that already the warmest hopes of the friends of Greece have been realised; and all the signs of advancing prosperity are to be seen in the land." It is a great mistake to imagine that the country is really in a prosperous state because Athens has trebled its population in thirty years. Athens has a well-furnished and rather a flourishing appearance, for the same reason that Nauplia looks out upon the beautiful Bay of Argos in such a state of woeful dismantlement and dilapidation : the court has left the Argive city, and travelled to the Attic; and all the gilded gingerbread, which you call prosperity, has gone with it. man be hasty to draw sanguine promises of Greek prosperity from anything good or glittering that may delight his eyes in the streets of Athens. That splendid palace of the little German prince, now called King of Greece, with its fine well-watered gardens without, and its fine pictures within, and its large dancing-saloon, the wonder even of London beauties-this palace was a mere toy of the boy's poetical papa, and has no more to do with the progress of real prosperity in Greece than a wax-doll has to do with life and organisation. Nay, it may be most certainly affirmed, that not a small part of that sudden growth of

Let no

the capital of Greece is, with reference to the country at large, a positive evil, a brilliant excrescence, which owes its existence altogether to the artificial attraction of the nutritive fluids of the body politic to one prominent point, while the largest and most useful limbs are left without their natural supply. If there are shining white palaces, and green Venetian blinds, in one Greek city, there is desolation and dreariness, stagnation and every sort of barbarism, in the fields. But "commerce flourishes;" it has doubled, says Sir A. Alison, since the battle of Navarino. Be it so. Patras is a goodly city, preferable, in some points, to Athens, we think; but were there not rich merchants at Hydra before the Revolution? and are the Greeks at Patras more prosperous than at Salonica, at Odessa, at Trieste, at Leghorn, at Manchester? There were always clever merchants among the Greeks, just as generally as there are sharp bankers and money-changers among Jews and Armenians. We

would by no means despair of Young Greece; there is much to admire in her, especially her schools, university, and the wonderful culture of her deathless language in its most recent shape; and only in a fit of foolish pettishness would any Englishman entertain the thought of blotting her again out of the map of nations, for any of the many sins she has committed, whether by her own fault, or— what we suspect to be the real truth

by the ignorant and officious agency of German bureaucratists, AngloFrench constitutionalists, and Muscovite diplomatists. Nevertheless, in so slippery a science as politics, and with creatures so difficult to manage as human beings, it is always better to avoid the temptation of drawing panoramic pictures in rose colour; and with regard to Greece, a country to which humanity owes so much, our first duty, in the present very critical state of Europe, is to look soberly at a reality full of perilous problems, and to possess our souls in patience.

If the latest lingering summer tourist in Scotland should perchance delay his departure until he is driven southward by the chill evenings of November, he may chance to see arising around him, in some considerable town, a race of young men, whose loose robes, varying from the brightest of fresh scarlet to the sombrest hue which years of bad usage can bestow on that gay colour, attract him as peculiar and funny, and as, on the whole, a phenomenon provocative of inquiry. He is told that the session has begun, and these are the students of the university. The information will perhaps be surprising to him, whoever he be if he be an Oxonian or Cantab, a sneer of derision will perhaps curve his lips when he remembers the gentleman commoners, and tufted noblemen, who crowd the streets of his Alma Mater in haughty exclusiveness and unmeasured contempt of the citizen class, who evidently have no respect whatever for the scarlet gown men of poor Scotland. Indeed, the luxurious academic ease, the placid repose of dignified scholarship, are strangers to these wearers of the flowing toga. It is evident that many of them have felt the pinch of poverty. No pliant gyp attends the toilet, or lays forth the table for the jovial"night-cap." Hard work and hard fare are their portion, and their raiment shows that they have been rubbed roughly against the world, instead of being set apart from its toils and cares and vulgar turmoil in aristocratic isolation. Some of the gowns are bright and new, indeed, and the faces in which they culminate are ruddy, fresh, and warm. Yet the youths endowed in these blushing honours seem not to exult therein, but rather to give place to the hardfeatured brethren, whose threadbare togas bear the grim marks of mud and soot, or hang in tatters like a beggar's cloak. The truth is, that the wear and tear of the gown is held indicative of advancement in the academic curriculum, and is rather encouraged than avoided. And of those who wear it, many, though they may

VOL. LXXVI.-NO. CCCCLXVI.

have been sufficiently tutored in the economy of their more serviceable clothing, have not made acquisitions in the school of finery, or acquired a weakness for decorative vanity. We remember an instance of a hard-featured mountaineer, who afterwards rose to distinction in an abstruse department of science, being charged by his fellow-students with having so far desecrated the gown as to have perambulated the streets with a barrow hawking potatoes, by the cry of "Taties-taties!" He admitted the commercial part of the charge, but denied the admixture of potato-vender and student by the desecration of the robes. He was careful to put off his gown while he cried "taties."

With all these and other indications of poverty, there is something to our eyes extremely interesting in the Scottish universities, as relics preserved through all changes in dynasties, constitutions, and ecclesiastical polities, through poverty, neglect, and enmity, of the original characteristics of the university system, as it existed in all its grandeur of design in the middle ages.

A collection of remarkable papers, now before us, opens up and presents, in valuable and full light, the progress of a portion of our Scottish universities. They consist of two works of that class commonly called "Club Books." The one is a collection of records and other documents connected with the University of Glasgow, printed under the auspices of the Maitland Club; the other a "Fasti Aberdonenses," appropriately collected by that northern association which, in honour of the Cavalier annalist of "The Troubles," is called the "Spalding Club." Both works are edited with that peculiar archæological strictness which has been applied to this class of documents, through the special skill of Mr Cosmo Innes. They are both edited by him, with some partial aid, in the case of the Glasgow documents, from his ablest coadjutor in Scottish archæology, Mr Joseph Robertson. These volumes form a very apt supplement to that collection of

K

ecclesiastical records which, arranged and printed under the same able management, are an honour to our country. With the exception of their curious and agreeable prefaces, neither the chartularies nor the volumes before us profess to be readable books. They are collections of records, and must have all the substantial dryness of records. But then they contain in themselves the materials of the social and incidental history of the classes of persons to which they refer, and contain imbedded within them the materials of instruction, both valuable and curious. With some labour we have driven shafts through their strata, and we may have occasion to lay before our readers a few of the specimens we have excavated-confining our selves, in the mean time, to the characteristics developed by the collection of documents.

The direction of these is chiefly to show how thoroughly these remote institutions partook in the great system of the European universities, and how many of its vestiges they still retain. The forms, the nomenclature, and the usages of the middle ages are still preserved, though some of them have naturally changed their character with the shifting of the times. Each university has still its chancellor, and sometimes a high State dignitary accepts of the office. It was of old a very peculiar one, for it was the link which allied the semirepublican institutions of the universities to the hierarchy of St Peter. The bishop was almost invariably the chancellor, unless the university were subordinated to some great monastic institution, when its head was the chancellor-as in Paris the Prior of St Genevieve exercised the high office. In the Scottish universities the usual Continental arrangement seems to have been adopted prior to the Reformation-as a matter of course, the bishop was the chancellor.

But while the institution was thus connected through a high dignitary with the Romish hierarchy, it possessed, as a great literary community with peculiar privileges, its own great officer electively chosen for the preservation of those privileges. It had its rector, who, like the chief magistrate of a municipal corporation, but

The

infinitely above him in the more illustrious character of the functions for which his constituents were incorporated, stood forth as the head of his republic, and its protector from the invasions either of the subtle churchmen or the grasping barons. rector, indeed, was the concentration of that peculiar commonwealth which the constitution of the ancient university prescribed. Sir William Hamilton has shown pretty clearly that, in its original acceptation, the word Universitas was applied, not to the comprehensiveness of the studies, but to that of the local and personal expansion of the institution. The university despised the bounds of provinces, and even nations, and was a place where ardent minds from all parts of the world met to study together, and impart to each other the influence of collective intellect working in combination and competition. The constitution of the rectorship was calculated to provide for the protection of this universality, for the election was managed by the procurators or proctors of the nations or local bodies into which the students were divided, generally for the purpose of neutralising the naturally superior influence of the home students, and keeping up the cosmopolitan character imparted to the system by its enlightened founders. Hence in Paris the nations were France, Picardy, and England, afterwards changed to Germany, in which Scotland was included. Glasgow is still divided into four nations: the Natio Glottiana, or Clydesdale, taken from the name given to the river by Tacitus. In the Natio Laudoniana were originally included the rest of Scotland, but it was found expedient to place the English and the colonists within it; while Albania, intended to include Britain south of the Forth, has been made rather inaptly the nation of the foreigners. Rothesay, the fourth nation, includes the extreme west of Scotland and Ireland. In Aberdeen there is a like division into Marenses, or inhabitants of Mar, Angusiani or men of Angus, which we believe includes the whole world south of the Grampians as the Angusiani, while the northern districts are partitioned into Buchanenses and Moravienses.