nd the payment of some purses to the
Divan, it has been permitted to continue. The principal professor, named
Ueniamin (i.e. Benjamin), is stated to be a man of talent, but a
freethinker. He was born in Lesbos, studied in Italy, and is master of
Hellenic, Latin, and some Frank languages: besides a smattering of the
sciences.

Though it is not my intention to enter farther on this topic than may
allude to the article in question, I cannot but observe that the
Reviewer's lamentation over the fall of the Greeks appears singular,
when he closes it with these words: "_The change is to be attributed to
their misfortunes rather than to any 'physical degradation.'_" It may be
true that the Greeks are not physically degenerated, and that
Constantinople contained on the day when it changed masters as many men
of six feet and upwards as in the hour of prosperity; but ancient
history and modern politics instruct us that something more than
physical perfection is necessary to preserve a state in vigour and
independence; and the Greeks, in particular, are a melancholy example of
the near connexion between moral degradation and national decay.

The Reviewer mentions a plan "_we believe_" by Potemkin[259] for the
purification of the Romaic; and I have endeavoured in vain to procure
any tidings or traces of its existence. There was an academy in St.
Petersburg for the Greeks; but it was suppressed by Paul, and has not
been revived by his successor.

There is a slip of the pen, and it can only be a slip of the pen, in p.
58, No. 31, of the _Edinburgh Review_, where these words occur: "We are
told that when the capital of the East yielded to _Solyman_"--It may be
presumed that this last word will, in a future edition, be altered to
Mahomet II.[260] The "ladies of Constantinople," it seems, at that
period spoke a dialect, "which would not have disgraced the lips of an
Athenian." I do not know how that might be, but am sorry to say that the
ladies in general, and the Athenians in particular, are much altered;
being far from choice either in their dialect or expressions, as the
whole Attic race are barbarous to a proverb:--

"[Greek: O) A)the~nai, pro/te cho/ra],
[Greek: Ti/ gaida/rous tre/pheis to/ra];"[261]

In Gibbon, vol. x. p. 161, is the following sentence:--"The vulgar
dialect of the city was gross and barbarous, though the compositions of
the church and palace sometimes affected to copy the purity of the Attic
models."