IMAGO MUNDI 13 



himself through an idle evening in a volume wherein the whole 

 world-tale is spread ; his reverie, when the attention flags and 

 the book is laid down, is one of mingled sadness and disgust ; 

 of revolt at the spectacle of carnage and rapacity ; whole 

 armies of men flung into a field to butcher each other for an 

 envied province or an imagined slight ; arson and thievery, 

 pillage and atrocious crimes applauded under the sounding 

 name of conquest ; great cities sacked, the populations sold in 

 degrading slavery, the women to shameful lives ; until a scant 

 century ago, the lower classes lost in barbarism and ignorance, 

 a prey to the wildest superstitions ; the upper class, a privi- 

 leged few, despising work, despoiling the poor, licensed to 

 pleasure, and often sunk in the grossest bestiality ; human 

 beings tossed to lions to glut the savage lusts of a Nero ; heroes 

 fed to slow fires for the preservation of the religion of God ; 

 low intrigues and court scandal, and women parading their 

 harlotry, because they are the prostitutes of an individual called 

 king ; nations and peoples rising to the splendour of an Athens 

 and then swept away ; mouldering stones where temples and 

 palaces reared their graceful forms ; world capitals the haunts 

 of jackals and the lizard blinking in the sun ; grandeur come to 

 dust, and enterprises of great pith and moment all turned awry. 

 A story of disillusionment, a theatre of riot and ruin ; a 

 retrospect of what we commonly accept for history brings a 

 weird and depressing feeling of its emptiness, its little importance, 

 its pointlessness, its unworth. It summons the oppressed spirit 

 of the melancholy Dane when he reflected on how 



" Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, 

 Might stop a hole to keep the wind away." 



Set over against this tale full of sound and fury is the 

 steady advance of civilisation, often slow, often halted, but 

 ever renewed ; the progress of invention, the amelioration of 

 savage and brutal customs, the abolition of slavery, the wide 

 diffusion of material comforts, of justice and of peace in 

 larger phrase, the broadening of the human mind, the heighten- 

 ing of the human consciousness. Instead of the mood of 

 Volney's Ruins, we have that of Macaulay's paean upon the 

 Baconian philosophy ; instead of disheartenment, a buoyant 

 and invigorating sense of things done, of progress and of 

 attainment. 



