r
success, but as regards the delicacy of restraints under which it moved;
so equally adjusted was their success to the immediate interests of that
period, and to the reversionary interests of our own. They did the
thing; but not so radically as to prevent us, their posterity, from
_un_doing it. They expelled the writing sufficiently to leave a field
for the new manuscript, and yet not sufficiently to make the traces of
the elder manuscript irrecoverable for us. Could magic, could Hermes
Trismegistus, have done more? What would you think, fair reader, of a
problem such as this--to write a book which should be sense for your own
generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into sense for the next
after that, but again became nonsense for the fourth; and so on by
alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into day, like the
Sicilian river Arethusa, and the English river Mole--or like the
undulating motions of a flattened stone which children cause to skim the
breast of a river, now diving below the water, now grazing its surface,
sinking heavily into darkness, rising buoyantly into light, through a
long vista of alternations? Such a problem, you say, is impossible. But
really it is a problem not harder apparently than--to bid a generation
kill, but so that a subsequent generation may call back into life; bury,
but so that posterity may command to rise again. Yet _that_ was what the
rude chemistry of past ages effected when coming into combination with
the reaction from the more refined chemistry of our own. Had _they_ been
better chemists, had _we_ been worse--the mixed result, viz. that, dying
for _them_, the flower should revive for _us_, could not have been
effected: They did the thing proposed to them: they did it effectually;
for they founded upon it all that was wanted: and yet ineffectually,
since we unravelled their work; effacing all above which they had
superscribed; restoring all below which they had effaced.

Here, for instance, is a parchment which contained some Grecian tragedy,
the Agamemnon of AEschylus, or the Phoenissae of Euripides. This had
possessed a value almost inappreciable in the eyes of accomplished
scholars, continually growing rarer through generations. But four
centuries are gone by since the destruction of the Western Empire.
Christianity, with towering grandeurs of another class, has founded a
different empire; and some bigoted yet perhaps holy monk has washed away
(as he pers