THE BOOK OF THE GREAT SEA-DRAGONS. 
27 
Moreover, it was impossible to avoid the much dis¬ 
puted question of Time and duration, a rock upon which 
no one has hitherto steered without foundering; and for 
which the Holy Scriptures have been perverted by the 
unclean of hand in a way to make us regret their transla¬ 
tion into our mother tongue. The incapacity of mankind 
to comprehend more than one of the thousand angles of 
Time, viz. that which he faces always in the fear and peril 
of Death, should, methink, have made us careful how we 
approached them. The Asiatics generally, and the He¬ 
brews in particular have a much more philosophical Dic¬ 
tionary of Time than the Europeans, who measure Cycles 
and Epicycles correctly, but dignifying them as Elements 
in the resolution of Time, they entirely overlook the moral 
quantities by which the former reach their grand conclu¬ 
sions. The short Circle we run around the Sun is adapted 
to our limits, but what is that compared to the Cycle of 
all the worlds. The Seer, standing in the Presence of Jeho¬ 
vah, Chaos and the Beginning of things out-battling 
before him, penetrated Systems beyond our imagination, 
and Equations to us unknown. His Periods of Time were 
reckoned by them, and not the fleeting ones in common 
use, so that all our Essays after the Chronology of Moses 
must end in disappointment until we obtain the measures 
by which he framed it. In distant Ages, when the teles¬ 
copic Instruments of men’s minds shall be better used and 
known, the centre of Relation to which the Earth really 
belongs may be found, and the Scriptures understood in a 
matter about which we can now hardly speculate without 
impiety. 
Natural Religion being confessedly insufficient, at the 
same time it carries us onward to the last stage but one 
towards the solution of the grand Argument of pre-human 
Time and things, we have invoked the Sphynx in the 
name of God, and decyphered. riddles by Revelation. The 
fashionable doctrine that Evil is infinitely overbalanced 
by good, and even made to subserve and multiply that 
good, so that it may be doubted if there be such a thing 
as Evil after all, is a Sophism which failed the Stoics two 
thousand years ago, and calculated for an infidel meridian 
alone. The argument for an eternal succession of Species 
having been disposed of, we cannot resist the innumerable 
tendencies which point to the first man as the most perfect 
of all the works of Jehovah ; and History testifies of re¬ 
nowned Sages, Lawgivers, and Mechanicians, the sound of 
whose wisdom and skill puts that of the moderns to shame ; 
nature herself, sympathizing with mind, then brought forth 
animals as much larger than their descendants as the 
Intellect of co-temporary man was nobler than our own. 
The Banks of Rio Plata have skeletons of an armadillo, 
Patagonia of a Llama and Rodent, thrice the size of their 
surviving congeners, and the remains of Pachydermata 
colossal by the side even of our modern giants, are dis¬ 
persed over all the world. The huge carnivorous Races 
found in Caverns and gravel-beds have a second moral 
from whence it is impossible to escape, and the Earth is 
filled with uncounted Ruin, but ill-concealed with flowers. 
Man too, exiled from the great Continentof the Universe, 
shackled with ancestral irons, pitiful and naked, exposed 
to every Tempest, on the brink of Eternity, splashing 
frequent to Suicides Immortal.— 
Or wandering over the Prison-Earth contemplative of 
a distant and strange Country, our final home, banished 
thence so long for no treason of our own, ever and anon 
glimpsing terrible Spectres of Might, our evil Genii.— 
Or fleeing from Them in terror, forgetful of the dismal 
Times, looking back retrospective far over the wintry 
Ocean, into Pre-adamic Shades, we encounter execrable 
and dreary things in the abounding Chaos. Through 
briny clouds incumbent impetuous Monsters gleam phre- 
nitic, livid, or green, or swarthy snakes, quadrupedal and 
deadly. Wide over the desolate Seas warring Dragons 
innumerable and hideous, enacting Perdition.— 
Whichever Sign of the Vasty Zodiac girdling the 
World, menacing Images gloomy and alien to the Nature 
of Man, dare and confront him. 
And the Animal, also the Spii'itual type of Horror and 
Woe, from natal Time downward to these our Days, and 
throughout the Eternal Perspective To come, is Draconic 
and Reptile. 
The mortal Dragon, which first troubled the primal 
Earth, lurking in the bowels of the Earth, the far Centre, 
turned from Light instinctive, anticipative. 
The Emperor of Dragon Spirits, Orcus, ruleth the 
nether Depths, coped with black adamant, 
“ Acherontia Templa, alta, Orci, pallida 
Leti omnubila, obsita tenebris loca.” 
The carcases of the Sea-Dragons are strown over the 
whole Earth; and thus shall dire thunderbolts which 
shattered life out of them, fall upon and overthrow the 
Kindred Legions of Sathanus. 
Onward then, to the End of Time, when the Rival 
Gods shall come to their last Battle, in the other Arma¬ 
geddon, our World being sacked and its ashes scattered 
to the Winds of Space. 
Thy Spirit, O Reader, and mine own shall be there, in 
that same Battle-field: In Coat of Mail impenetrable by 
rare inductions from these same Sea-Dragons, and with 
Weapons of Spoil taken from the Enemy in the Tourney 
of Earth, there will we muster Host. 
The Deluge of Wrath once loosened upon the Earth, 
shall be let slip again in an Ocean of Fire inextinguish¬ 
able, and roar responsive to the agonized Legions of the 
Old Dragon, overwhelmed in His turn. 
The baneful Dragons, O Seas, are gone : Fiends, O 
Earth, have filled thee with the bones of Defeat and 
Death. Future Angels to whom the Wars and Destruc¬ 
tions of Time are unknown, shall seek throughout the 
limitless Empires of Space their ghastly remains, and 
finding amongst them the self-same Weapons of which 
we speak, be curious in remote centenaries to hear anew 
the Tale of the Dragons. 
FINIS. 
C. Whittingham, Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, London, 
