k that half
past one was late in 1836. At that time the "Great Western Mail" was due
in Boston at 6 P. M., and there was no later news except "local," or an
occasional horse express.

[8] The reader will observe the Arcadian habits of 1836, when
the German was yet unknown.

THE OLD AND THE NEW, FACE TO FACE.

A THUMB-NAIL SKETCH.

[This essay was published in Sartain's Magazine, in 1852, as "A
Thumb-nail Sketch," having received one of ten premiums which Mr.
Sartain offered to encourage young writers. It had been written a few
years earlier, some time before the studies of St. Paul's life by
Conybeare and Howson, now so well known, were made public. The
chronology of my essay does not precisely agree with that of these
distinguished scholars. But I make no attempt now either to recast the
essay or to discuss the delicate and complicated questions which belong
to the chronology of Paul's life or to that of Nero; for there is no
question with regard to the leading facts. At the end of twenty years I
may again express the wish that some master competent to the greatest
themes might take the trial of Paul as the subject of a picture.]

In a Roman audience-chamber, the old civilization and the new
civilization brought out, at the very birth of the new, their chosen
champions.

In that little scene, as in one of Rembrandt's thumbnail studies for a
great picture, the lights and shades are as distinct as they will ever
be in the largest scene of history. The champions were perfect
representatives of the parties. And any man, with the soul of a man,
looking on, could have prophesied the issue of the great battle from the
issue of that contest.

The old civilization of the Roman Empire, just at that time, had reached
a point which, in all those outward forms which strike the eye, would
regard our times as mean indeed. It had palaces of marble, where even
modern kings would build of brick with a marble front to catch the eye;
it counted its armies by thousands, where we count ours by hundreds; it
surmounted long colonnades with its exquisite statues, for which modern
labor digs deep in ruined cities, because it cannot equal them from its
own genius; it had roads, which are almost eternal, and which, for their
purposes, show a luxury of wealth and labor that our boasted locomotion
cannot rival. These are its works of a larger scale. And if you enter
the palaces, you find pictures of matchless worth, rich dresses