over us, in the rare cases when it can be enjoyed, than
any indirect influence which the same mind may exert through the
medium of printed books! What fellow of a college, placed amid the most
abundant and efficient implements of study, ever gets such a stimulus to
the highest and richest intellectual life as was afforded to Eckermann
by his daily intercourse with Goethe? The breadth of culture and the
perfection of training exhibited by John Stuart Mill need not surprise
us when we recollect that his earlier days were spent in the society of
James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. And the remarkable extent of view, the
command of facts, and the astonishing productiveness of such modern
Frenchmen as Sainte-Beuve and Littre become explicable when we reflect
upon the circumstance that so many able and brilliant men are collected
in one city, where their minds may continually and directly react upon
each other. It is from the lack of such personal stimulus that it is
difficult or indeed wellnigh impossible, even for those whose resources
are such as to give them an extensive command of books, to keep up to
the highest level of contemporary culture while living in a village or
provincial town. And it is mainly because of the personal stimulus
which it affords to its students, that a great university, as a seat of
culture, is immeasurably superior to a small one.

Nevertheless, the small community in any age possesses one signal
advantage over the large one, in its greater simplicity of life and its
consequent relative leisure. It was the prerogative of ancient Athens
that it united the advantages of the large to those of the small
community. In relative simplicity of life it was not unlike the modern
village, while at the same time it was the metropolis where the foremost
minds of the time were enabled to react directly upon one another.
In yet another respect these opposite advantages were combined. The
twenty-five thousand free inhabitants might perhaps all know something
of each other. In this respect Athens was doubtless much like a New
England country town, with the all-important difference that the sordid
tone due to continual struggle for money was absent. It was like the
small town in the chance which it afforded for publicity and community
of pursuits among its inhabitants. Continuous and unrestrained social
intercourse was accordingly a distinctive feature of Athenian life.
And, as already hinted, this intercourse did not c