under the emperors, notwithstanding all her astonishing profligacy and
anarchy. And, lastly, after her secular ascendancy had been destroyed by
the inroads of the northern barbarians, she rose like the phoenix from
her ashes, and, though powerless in material force, held mankind in
subjection by the chains of the mind, and the consummateness of her
policy. Never was any thing so admirably contrived as the Catholic
religion, to subdue the souls of men by the power of its worship over
the senses, and, by its contrivances in auricular confession,
purgatory, masses for the dead, and its claim magisterially to determine
controversies, to hold the subjects it had gained in everlasting
submission.

The great principle of originality is in the soul of man. And here again
we may recur to Greece, the parent of all that is excellent in art.
Painting, statuary, architecture, poetry, in their most exquisite and
ravishing forms, originated in this little province. Is not the Iliad a
thing new, and that will for ever remain new? Whether it was written by
one man, as I believe, or, as the levellers of human glory would have
us think, by many, there it stands: all the ages of the world present us
nothing that can come in competition with it.

Shakespear is another example of unrivalled originality. His fame is
like the giant-rivers of the world: the further it flows, the wider it
spreads out its stream, and the more marvellous is the power with which
it sweeps along.

But, in reality, all poetry and all art, that have a genuine claim to
originality, are new, the smallest, as well as the greatest.

It is the mistake of dull minds only, to suppose that every thing
has been said, that human wit is exhausted, and that we, who have
unfortunately fallen upon the dregs of time, have no alternative left,
but either to be silent, or to say over and over again, what has been
well said already.

There remain yet immense tracts of invention, the mines of which have
been untouched. We perceive nothing of the strata of earth, and the
hidden fountains of water, that we travel over, unconscious of the
treasures that are immediately within our reach, till some person,
endowed with the gift of a superior sagacity, comes into the country,
who appears to see through the opake and solid mass, as we see through
the translucent air, and tells us of things yet undiscovered, and
enriches us with treasures, of which we had been hitherto entirely
ignorant