294 SIR ISAAC NEWTON/ 



search after truths the most important, and at whose hands the 

 human race had only received good, never evil, those nations 

 have raised no memorial which erected statues to the tyrants 

 and conquerors, the scourges of mankind ; whose lives were 

 passed not in the pursuit of truth but the practice of false- 

 hood ; across whose lips, if truth ever chanced to stray 

 towards some selfish end, it surely failed to obtain belief; 

 who, to slake their insane thirst of power, or of pre-eminence, 

 trampled on all the rights, and squandered the blood of their 

 fellow-creatures ; whose course, like the lightning, blasted 

 while it dazzled ; and who, reversing the noble regret of the 

 Roman Emperor, deemed the day lost that saw the sun go 

 ^down upon their forbearance, no victim deceived, or betrayed, 

 or oppressed. That the worshippers of such pestilent genius 

 should consecrate no outward symbol of the admiration they 

 freely confessed, to the memory of the most illustrious of men, 

 is not matter of wonder. But that his own countrymen, justly 

 proud of having lived in his time, should have left this duty 

 to their successors, after a century and a half of professed 

 veneration and lip homage, may well be deemed strange. 

 The inscription upon the Cathedral, masterpiece of his cele- 

 brated friend's architecture, may possibly be applied in 

 defence of this neglect. " If you seek for a monument, look 

 around."* If you seek for a monument lift up your eyes to 

 the heavens which show forth his fame. Nor when we re- 

 collect the Greek orator's exclamation, " The whole earth is 

 the monument of illustrious men," f can we stop short of 

 declaring that the whole universe is Newton's. Yet in 

 raising the Statue which preserves his likeness near the plaee 

 of his birth, on the spot where his prodigious faculties were 

 unfolded and trained, we at once gratify our honest pride as 

 citizens of the same state, and humbly testifiy our grateful 

 sense of the Divine goodness which deigned to bestow upon 

 our race one so marvellously gifted to comprehend the works 



* " Si momunentum quams, circumspice." (On Wren in St. Paul's.) 

 t Pericles. (Thuc. IT. 43.) 



