in our _coal smoke_ for centuries) to the memory of the Scaligers;
and surely the great critic of that name could not have taken a more
certain method of proving his descent from these his barbarous
ancestors, than that which his relationship to them naturally, I
suppose, inspired him with--the avowed preference of birth to talents,
of long-drawn genealogy to hardly-acquired literature. We will however
grow less prejudiced ourselves; and since there are still whole nations
of people existing, who consider the counting up many generations back
as a felicity not to be exchanged for any other without manifest loss,
we may possibly reconcile the opinion to common sense, by reflecting
that one preconception of the sovereign good is, that it should
certainly be _indeprivable_ and except birth, what is there earthly
after all that may not drop, or else be torn from its possessor by
accident, folly, force, or malice?

James Harris says, that virtue answers to the character of
indeprivability, but one is left only to wish that his position were
true; the continuance of virtue depends on the continuance of reason,
from which a blow on the head, a sudden fit of terror, or twenty other
accidents may separate us in a moment. Nothing can make us not one's
father's child however, and the advantages of _blood_, such as they are,
may surely be deemed _indeprivable_.

Gothic and Grecian architecture resembles Gothic and Grecian manners,
which naturally do give their colour to such arts as are naturally the
result of them. Tyranny and gloomy suspicion are the characteristics of
the one, openness and sociability strongly mark the other--when to the
gay portico succeeded the sullen drawbridge, and to the lively corridor,
a secret passage and a winding staircase.

It is difficult, if not impossible however, to withhold one's respect
from those barbarians who could thus change the face of art, almost of
nature; who could overwhelm courage and counteract learning; who not
only devoured the works of wisdom and the labours of strength, but left
behind them too a settled system of feudatorial life and aristocratic
power, still undestroyed in Europe, though hourly attacked, battered by
commerce, and sapped by civilization.

When Smeathman told us about twelve years ago, how an immense body of
African ants, which appeared, as they moved forwards, like the whole
earth in agitation--covered and suddenly arrested a solemn elephant, as
he grazed un