and multiplied
by bounties. The singular excellence to which eloquence attained at
Athens is to be mainly attributed to the influence which it exerted
there. In turbulent times, under a constitution purely democratic,
among a people educated exactly to that point at which men are most
susceptible of strong and sudden impressions, acute, but not sound
reasoners, warm in their feelings, unfixed in their principles,
and passionate admirers of fine composition, oratory received such
encouragement as it has never since obtained.

The taste and knowledge of the Athenian people was a favourite object of
the contemptuous derision of Samuel Johnson; a man who knew nothing of
Greek literature beyond the common school-books, and who seems to have
brought to what he had read scarcely more than the discernment of a
common school-boy. He used to assert, with that arrogant absurdity
which, in spite of his great abilities and virtues, renders him, perhaps
the most ridiculous character in literary history, that Demosthenes
spoke to a people of brutes;--to a barbarous people;--that there could
have been no civilisation before the invention of printing. Johnson
was a keen but a very narrow-minded observer of mankind. He perpetually
confounded their general nature with their particular circumstances. He
knew London intimately. The sagacity of his remarks on its society is
perfectly astonishing. But Fleet Street was the world to him. He
saw that Londoners who did not read were profoundly ignorant; and
he inferred that a Greek, who had few or no books, must have been as
uninformed as one of Mr Thrale's draymen.

There seems to be, on the contrary, every reason to believe, that, in
general intelligence, the Athenian populace far surpassed the lower
orders of any community that has ever existed. It must be considered,
that to be a citizen was to be a legislator,--a soldier,--a judge,--one
upon whose voice might depend the fate of the wealthiest tributary
state, of the most eminent public man. The lowest offices, both of
agriculture and of trade, were, in common, performed by slaves. The
commonwealth supplied its meanest members with the support of life, the
opportunity of leisure, and the means of amusement. Books were indeed
few: but they were excellent; and they were accurately known. It is
not by turning over libraries, but by repeatedly perusing and intently
contemplating a few great models, that the mind is best disciplined. A
man of le