s of clients, and hosts and _proxeni_ of strangers and visitors,
as well as masters of the schools: and the Cappadocian, Syrian, or
Sicilian youth who came to one or other of them, would be encouraged to
study by his protection, and to aspire by his example.

Even Plato, when the schools of Athens were not a hundred years old,
was in circumstances to enjoy the _otium cum dignitate_. He had a
villa out at Heraclea; and he left his patrimony to his school, in
whose hands it remained, not only safe, but fructifying, a marvellous
phenomenon in tumultuous Greece, for the long space of eight hundred
years. Epicurus too had the property of the Gardens where he lectured;
and these too became the property of his sect. But in Roman times the
chairs of grammar, rhetoric, politics, and the four philosophies, were
handsomely endowed by the State; some of the Professors were themselves
statesmen or high functionaries, and brought to their favourite study
senatorial rank or Asiatic opulence.

Patrons such as these can compensate to the freshman, in whom we have
interested ourselves, for the poorness of his lodging and the
turbulence of his companions. In every thing there is a better side
and a worse; in every place a disreputable set and a respectable, and
the one is hardly known at all to the other. Men come away from the
same University at this day, with contradictory impressions and
contradictory statements, according to the society they have found
there; if you believe the one, nothing goes on there as it should be:
if you believe the other, nothing goes on as it should _not_. Virtue,
however, and decency are at least in the minority everywhere, and under
some sort of a cloud or disadvantage; and this being the case, it is so
much gain whenever an Herodes Atticus is found, to throw the influence
of wealth and station on the side even of a decorous philosophy. A
consular man, and the heir of an ample fortune, this Herod was content
to devote his life to a professorship, and his fortune to the patronage
of literature. He gave the sophist Polemo about eight thousand pounds,
as the sum is calculated, for three declamations. He built at Athens a
stadium six hundred feet long, entirely of white marble, and capable of
admitting the whole population. His theatre, erected to the memory of
his wife, was made of cedar wood curiously carved. He had two villas,
one at Marathon, the place of his birth, about ten miles from Athens,