e were prepared accurate Latin versions
of many precious remains of Greek poets and philosophers. But no
department of literature owes so much to him as history. By him were
introduced to the knowledge of Western Europe two great and unrivalled
models of historical composition, the work of Herodotus and the work of
Thucydides. By him, too, our ancestors were first made acquainted with
the graceful and lucid simplicity of Xenophon and with the manly good
sense of Polybius.

It was while he was occupied with cares like these that his attention
was called to the intellectual wants of this region, a region now
swarming with population, rich with culture, and resounding with the
clang of machinery, a region which now sends forth fleets laden with its
admirable fabrics to the lands of which, in his days, no geographer had
ever heard, then a wild, a poor, a half barbarous tract, lying on the
utmost verge of the known world. He gave his sanction to the plan of
establishing a University at Glasgow, and bestowed on the new seat of
learning all the privileges which belonged to the University of Bologna.
I can conceive that a pitying smile passed over his face as he named
Bologna and Glasgow together. At Bologna he had long studied. No spot
in the world had been more favoured by nature or by art. The surrounding
country was a fruitful and sunny country, a country of cornfields and
vineyards. In the city, the house of Bentivoglo bore rule, a house which
vied with the house of Medici in taste and magnificence, which has
left to posterity noble palaces and temples, and which gave a splendid
patronage to arts and letters. Glasgow your founder just knew to be a
poor, a small, a rude town, a town, as he would have thought, not likely
ever to be great and opulent; for the soil, compared with the rich
country at the foot of the Apennines, was barren, and the climate was
such that an Italian shuddered at the thought of it. But it is not on
the fertility of the soil, it is not on the mildness of the atmosphere,
that the prosperity of nations chiefly depends. Slavery and superstition
can make Campania a land of beggars, and can change the plain of Enna
into a desert. Nor is it beyond the power of human intelligence and
energy, developed by civil and spiritual freedom, to turn sterile rocks
and pestilential marshes into cities and gardens. Enlightened as your
founder was, he little knew that he was himself a chief agent in a great
revolution,