very effects of the
disasters they inflicted on mankind seem to be swept away, as of no more
validity than things that never existed. Warriors and poets, the authors
of systems and the lights of philosophy, men that astonished the earth,
and were looked up to as Gods, even like an actor on the stage, have
strutted their hour, and then been heard of no more.

Books have the advantage of all other productions of the human head or
hand. Copies of them may be multiplied for ever, the last as good as
the first, except so far as some slight inadvertent errors may have
insinuated themselves. The Iliad flourishes as green now, as on the
day that Pisistratus is said first to have stamped upon it its present
order. The songs of the Rhapsodists, the Scalds, and the Minstrels,
which once seemed as fugitive as the breath of him who chaunted them,
repose in libraries, and are embalmed in collections. The sportive
sallies of eminent wits, and the Table Talk of Luther and Selden, may
live as long as there shall be men to read, and judges to appreciate
them.

But other human productions have their date. Pictures, however
admirable, will only last as long as the colours of which they are
composed, and the substance on which they are painted. Three or four
hundred years ordinarily limit the existence of the most favoured. We
have scarcely any paintings of the ancients, and but a small portion of
their statues, while of these a great part are mutilated, and various
members supplied by later and inferior artists. The library of Bufo is
by Pope described,

where busts of poets dead,
And a true Pindar stood without a head.

Monumental records, alike the slightest and the most solid, are
subjected to the destructive operation of time, or to the being removed
at the caprice or convenience of successive generations. The pyramids
of Egypt remain, but the names of him who founded them, and of him
whose memory they seemed destined to perpetuate, have perished together.
Buildings for the use or habitation of man do not last for ever. Mighty
cities, as well as detached edifices, are destined to disappear. Thebes,
and Troy, and Persepolis, and Palmyra have vanished from the face of the
earth.

"Thorns and brambles have grown up in their palaces: they are
habitations for serpents, and a court for the owl."

There are productions of man however that seem more durable than any
of the edifices he has raised. Such are, in the first