general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries. On Boswell's Life of Johnson. She (the Roman Catholic Church) may still exist in undiminished vigour, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.1 Review of Ranke's History of the Popes. 1 The same image was employed by Macaulay in 1824, in the concluding paragraph of a review of Mitford's Greece; and he repeated it in his review of Mill's Essay on Government, in 1829. Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name? - Volney's Ruins, Ch. 2. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra. Horace Walpole, Letter to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774. Where now is Britain? Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks where stood her capitols, and hears Henry Kirke White, Time. In the firm expectation, that when London shall be In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall. On Warren Hastings. In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America. Frederic the Great. We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking, and so grotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other. Ibid. There were gentlemen and there were seamen an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians. - Shelley, Dedication to Peter Bell. in the Navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.1 History of England. Vol. i. Ch. 2. The Puritans hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.2 Ibid. Vol. i. Ch. 3. To every man upon this earth For the ashes of his fathers Lays of Ancient Rome. Horatius, xxvii. How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old. Ibid. lxx. These be the Great Twin Brethren To whom the Dorians pray. The Battle of Lake Regillus. The sweeter sound of woman's praise. Lines written in August, 1847. 1 I have read their platform; but I see nothing in it both new and valuable. "What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable." - Daniel Webster, Speech, March, 1848. If I am Sophocles, I am not mad: and if I am mad, I am not Sophocles. -Vit. anon. Plumptre, p. lxiv. 2 Even bearbaiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian; the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence. Hume, History of England, Vol. i. Ch. 62. T WILLIAM H. SEWARD. 1801-1872. There is a higher law than the Constitution. Speech, March 11, 1850. School and School-fellows. Some lie beneath the churchyard stone, And some before the speaker. I remember, I remember How my childhood fleeted by, The mirth of its December, And the warmth of its July. Ibid. I remember, I remember. GEORGE P. MORRIS. 1802-1864. Woodman, spare that tree! Touch not a single bough!1 In youth it sheltered me, And I'll protect it now. Woodman, spare that Tree. (1830.) 1 O leave this barren spot to me! Spare, woodman, spare the beechen tree. Thomas Campbell, The Beech Tree's Petition (1802). A song for our banner? The watchword recall Which gave the Republic her station: "United we stand — divided we fall!" It made and preserves us a nation! The union of lakes - the union of lands The union of States none can severThe union of hearts the union of handsAnd the Flag of our Union forever! The Flag of our Union Near the lake where drooped the willow, Long time ago! Near the Lake EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. Beneath the rule of men entirely great Richelieu. Act ii. Sc. 2. Take away the sword; States can be saved without it. Ibid. In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves For a bright manhood, there is no such word As-fail. Ibid. Frank, haughty, rash, the Rupert of debate. The New Timon. Parti. St. 6. So idly spoken, and so coldly heard ; Yet all that poets sing, and grief hath known, Of hopes laid waste,knells in that word-ALONE! Ibid. Part ii. 7. |