of Edinburgh, Session 1881-82. 
441 
the calm discussion befitting this Society. Thus much only let me 
remark, that any student of these questions would do well to ask 
whether this extension of sympathy has not been a plant of somewhat 
tardy growth. Let him look at the feudalist historians, such as 
Froissart and De Comines : let him read the comments upon the 
letters of Madame de Sevign6, made in one of the great books of this 
century, the American Democracy of De Tocqueville. 
In the very year 1755, in which the ruins of the Campanian cities 
were first excavated, Europe was startled by a catastrophe no less 
terrible, — by that earthquake at Lisbon (at first discredited even by 
such a man as Dr. Johnson), but which, when proved, produced a 
profound impression, as well it might, when we remember that it 
destroyed one-third of an European capital, and caused the death of 
15,000 persons. Let the inquirer read the accounts not only as 
given by British historians, but also in Sismondi’s Histoire des 
Frangais. He will find himself in the presence of questions connected 
with the proper limits of sympathy and of tolerance, of which I will 
only venture to say here, that I cannot regard them as yet fully 
solved ; and that I can hardly believe that they ever will receive 
their solution from any who imagine them to be simple elements 
which can be easily disengaged from the complex structure of 
modern civilisation. 
APPENDIX. 
( Added during Printing.) 
At the conclusion of the above paper, Dr. Donaldson, Professor of 
Humanity in the University of Aberdeen, after kindly thanking its 
author for his address, made two exceptions to its line of argument. 
In the first place, urged the Professor, the gaps in the history of those 
times are so great that one would hardly wonder if the destruction of 
these cities had remained entirely unnoticed. The wall of Antoninus 
between the Forth and the Clyde was only mentioned by one author, 
and he did not write until a century after its formation. Moreover, 
one important passage bearing upon the question had been overlooked. 
The emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his well-known Meditations , written 
about a century after the event, refers to the destruction of Pompeii 
and Herculaneum as an event perfectly well known. 
