While this mode of life holds out facilities for indiscretions which the greater activity and occupation of even a mercantile city prevent, the great numbers take off the shame of individual transactions, and give a fashion and eclât to what would no where else be tolerated. Youths of no great advance in life have their nightly drinking-bouts, and boys, in the first year of their studies or apprenticeships, have their occasional carousals in ale-houses suited to the state of their funds. As the greater number of young men in the Athens, setting aside the working classes, whose conduct is very different, are of this description, perhaps they stamp upon the whole place much of its character; and, especially in the several professions connected with the law, they in all probability stamp the greater part of it.
The results are just what might be expected. There is no place that I visited where both the manners and the morals of young persons are so free; and, with a greater partiality for the bottle, and a greater proneness to all its consequences, there is perhaps less moral feeling, and a less clear perception either of intellectual or of moral truth, among young men who have passed through the several stages of an Athenian education, than among those who have had their novitiate any where else. Too young for reflection, and too much exposed to temptation for study, their minds become as desultory as their manners are dissipated; and while yet they hardly know any thing, they are prompt in their decision of every thing; and having once found that it is easier, and gives more notoriety to decide without thinking, than to think without deciding, they become as dogmatical in speech as they are shallow in knowledge, and raw in experience.
The force of ardent and inexperienced passions, just set loose from paternal restraint, the force of every day’s example, the force of ridicule, and frequently also the force of direct compulsion, all conspire to drive every young man who goes to reside in the Athens into these courses, and to keep him in them as long as he continues to reside in the Athens; and be it for study or for business, the novitiate is in ordinary cases sufficiently long to stamp the character for life. Accordingly it has been remarked, that though young men who profited by a regular course of Athenian study, be often very showy and frequently very jovial as companions, they are not very pre-eminent for sagacity as counsellors, or trust-worthiness as friends. Coming from the provinces in all their greenness, without any principle, save that prudence which their parents tried to inculcate, and getting rid of that very speedily, they are left like blank-paper, upon which the Athens may inscribe her peculiar characters. There they grow up, and acquire the passions, and learn the vices of men, while they have the intellect only of boys.