ters have portrayed ; the rivers flowing with milk and honey, the 

 balm of Judea, the cedars of Lebanon, the clustering grapes of the 

 valley of Eschcol ? What has befallen Zidon — the joyous Zidon ? or 

 "who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose 

 merchants were princes, whose traffickers were the honourable of the 

 earth."* The glory of Troy has passed away like the baseless fabric of a 

 \ision, and herds graze over the ruins of a city, whose proud gates were 

 once thronged with tributary kings and chieftains. Egypt, the mother 

 of wisdom and the sciences, the source of learning to the Greeks and 

 Romans, the country of Thebes and its hundred gates — what is she 

 now ? — Where are the records of the Phoenicians, once the merchants 

 of the world ? Can the site of Veii be any longer ascertained ? Can 

 even Sparta be identified in the "uncertain traces of a promiscuous 

 wreck ?"-\- The traveller stands on a heap of rubbish, and he asks, — 

 where is Carthage ? He shrinks from the enslaved, degenerate Italian, 

 and marvels that such a people could once have been the polishers of 

 manners, the dispensers of laws, the conquerors of the world ! The 

 memory sickens at the awful retrospect, but the sublimity of the mo- 

 ral speaks to the heart. — The thoughts — the labours — the greatness of 

 man, the sciences of his reason, the arts of his ingenuity, the regalia 

 of his artificial sovereignty, pass away like the frail being from whom 

 they originated, the universe of creation alone wears the immutability 

 of grandeur, the immortality of the hand that made it. 



Ireland too has had its long night of barbarism, but there was 

 day-light before the darkness thickened. All is not a literary chaos 

 in the records of "that people which, in truth," admits Edmund 

 Spencer, " I think to be more auntient than most that I know in this 

 end of the world,"+ or in the associations of that country, which, ac- 



• Isaiah, xxiir. 8. f Dodwell's Travels in Greece, &c. 



X Spencer's View, Dub. Edit. p. 57. 



