rbours. Lucullus collected a magnificent library in the East,
and Caesar converted his northern expeditions into an antiquarian and
historical research.

Nor is this an accident in Roman annals. She was a power pre-eminently
military; yet what is her history but the most remarkable instance of a
political development and progress? More than any power, she was able to
accommodate and expand her institutions according to the circumstances
of successive ages, extending her municipal privileges to the conquered
cities, yielding herself to the literature of Greece, and admitting into
her bosom the rites of Egypt and Phrygia. At length, by an effort of
versatility unrivalled in history, she was able to reverse one main
article of her policy, and, as she had already acknowledged the
intellectual supremacy of Greece, so did she humble herself in a still
more striking manner before a religion which she had persecuted.

5.

If these remarks upon the difference between barbarism and civilization
be in the main correct, they have prepared the way for answering the
question which I have raised concerning the principle of life and the
mode of dissolution proper or natural to barbarous and civilized powers
respectively. Ratiocination and its kindred processes, which are the
necessary instruments of political progress, are, taking things as we
find them, hostile to imagination and auxiliary to sense. It is true
that a St. Thomas can draw out a whole system of theology from
principles impalpable and invisible, and fix upon the mind by pure
reason a vast multitude of facts and truths which have no pretence to a
bodily form. But, taking man as he is, we shall commonly find him
dissatisfied with a demonstrative process from an undemonstrated
premiss, and, when he has once begun to reason, he will seek to prove
the point from which his reasoning starts, as well as that at which it
arrives. Thus he will be forced back from immediate first principles to
others more remote, nor will he be satisfied till he ultimately reaches
those which are as much within his own handling and mastery as the
reasoning apparatus itself. Hence it is that civilized states ever tend
to substitute objects of sense for objects of imagination, as the basis
of their existence. The Pope's political power was greater when Europe
was semi-barbarous; and the divine right of the successors of the
English St. Edward received a death-blow in the philosophy of Bacon and
L