on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.1 On Ranke's History of the Popes. 1840.

The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.

On Warren Hastings. 1841.

In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet

1 The same image was employed by Macaulay in 1824 in the concluding paragraph of a review of Mitford's Greece, and he repeated it in his review of Mill's "Essay on Government" in 1829.

What cities, as great as this, have . . . promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others. . . Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins. GOLDSMITH: The Bee, No. iv. (1759.) A City Night-Piece.

Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name? - VOLNEY: Ruins, chap. ii.

The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, in time a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra. HORACE WALPOLE: Letter to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774. Where now is Britain?

Even as the savage sits upon the stone

That marks where stood her capitols, and hears
The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks
From the dismaying solitude.

HENRY KIRKE WHITE: Time.

In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians. SHELLEY: Dedication to Peter Bell the Third.

resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.

On Warren Hastings. 1841.

In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

On Frederic the Great. 1842.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other. Ibid. Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely. Southey's Colloquies.

Nothing is so galling to a people, not broken in from the birth, as a paternal or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read and say and eat and drink and wear.

Ibid.

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm. On Hallam's Constitutional History.

Intoxicated with animosity.

Ibid.

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

History of England. Vol. i. Chap. i.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.1

Ibid.

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.

Chap. ii.

1 See Bolingbroke, page 304.

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.1 History of England. Vol. i. Chap. iii.

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.2

On Lord Bacon.

I have not the Chancellor's encyclopedic mind. He is indeed a kind of semi-Solomon. He half knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.3

Letter to Macvey Napier, Dec. 17, 1830.

These be the great Twin Brethren
To whom the Dorians pray.

The Battle of Lake Regillus.

Oh! wherefore come ye forth in triumph from the north, With your hands and your feet and your raiment all red?

1 Even bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence. - HUME: History of England, vol. i. chap. lxii.

See Tennyson: "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."

I wish I were as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything. William Windham (1750-1810).

And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye
tread?
The Battle of Naseby.

Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.1

Political Georgics.

J. AUGUSTUS WADE. 1800-1875.

Meet me by moonlight alone,

And then I will tell you a tale
Must be told by the moonlight alone,
In the grove at the end of the vale!
You must promise to come, for I said
I would show the night-flowers their queen.
Nay, turn not away that sweet head,

"T is the loveliest ever was seen.

'T were vain to tell thee all I feel,
Or say for thee I'd die.

Meet me by Moonlight.

Ah, well-a-day, the sweetest melody

Could never, never say, one half my love for thee.

'T were vain to tell.

LORD CHARLES NEAVES. 1800-1876.

Pouter, tumbler and fantail are from the same source;
The racer and hack may be traced to one horse;
So men were developed from monkeys of course,2
Which nobody can deny.

The Origin of Species.

1 Macaulay, in a letter, June 29, 1831, says "I sent these lines to the Times' about three years ago."

* See Lord Beaconsfield, page 625.

SIR HENRY TAYLOR. 1800-1886.

His food

Was glory, which was poison to his mind.

And peril to his body.

Philip Van Artevelde. Part i. Act i. Sc. 5.

The world knows nothing of its greatest men.

Ibid.

An unreflected light did never yet

Dazzle the vision feminine.

Ibid.

He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure

For life's worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow's held intrusive and turned out,
.There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.

We figure to ourselves

The thing we like; and then we build it up,
As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,
For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world,
And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.

Such souls,

Whose sudden visitations daze the world,
Vanish like lightning, but they leave behind
A voice that in the distance far away
Wakens the slumbering ages.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD. 1801-1872.

The Constitution devotes the national domain to union, to justice, to defence, to welfare and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the Constitution.

Speech, March 11, 1850.