he human
creature in his passions and ambitions, his sensual or sordid desires,
his emotional and moral nature, undergoes less change than might be hoped
from age to age. The tyrant; the patriot, the demagogue, the voluptuary,
the peasant, the trader, the intriguing politician, the hair-splitting
diplomatist, the self-sacrificing martyr, the self-seeking courtier,
present essentially one type in the twelfth, the sixteenth, the
nineteenth, or any other century. The human tragi-comedy seems ever to
repeat itself with the same bustle, with the same excitement for
immediate interests, for the development of the instant plot or passing
episode, as if the universe began and ended with each generation--as in
reality it would appear to do for the great multitude of the actors.
There seems but a change of masks, of costume, of phraseology, combined
with a noisy but eternal monotony. Yet while men are produced and are
whirled away again in endless succession, Man remains, and to all
appearance is perpetual and immortal even on this earth. Whatever science
acquires man inherits. Whatever steadfastness is gained for great moral
truths which change not through the ages--however they may be thought, in
dark or falsely brilliant epochs, to resolve themselves into elemental
vapour--gives man a securer foothold in his onward and upward progress.
The great, continuous history of that progress is not made up of the
reigns of kings or the lives of politicians, with whose names history has
often found it convenient to mark its epochs. These are but milestones on
the turnpike. Human progress is over a vast field, and it is only at
considerable intervals that a retrospective view enables us to discern
whether the movement has been slow or rapid, onward or retrograde.

The record of our race is essentially unwritten. What we call history is
but made up of a few scattered fragments, while it is scarcely given to
human intelligence to comprehend the great whole. Yet it is strange to
reflect upon the leisurely manner in which great affairs were conducted
in the period with which we are now occupied, as compared with the fever
and whirl of our own times, in which the stupendous powers of steam and
electricity are ever-ready to serve the most sublime or the most vulgar
purposes of mankind. Whether there were ever a critical moment in which a
rapid change might have been effected in royal or national councils, had
telegraphic wires and express trains