country, destroyed by an army a thousand times as numerous; and I saw
this same army, in its turn, caused to disappear, and destroyed or driven
from the shores of Europe by the brethren of that band of martyred
patriots; I saw bodies of these men traversing the sea, founding
colonies, building cities, and wherever they established themselves,
carrying with them their peculiar arts. Towns and temples arose
containing schools, and libraries filled with the rolls of the papyrus.
The same steel, such a tremendous instrument of power in the hands of the
warrior, I saw applied, by the genius of the artist, to strike forms even
more perfect than those of life out of the rude marble; and I saw the
walls of the palaces and temples covered with pictures, in which
historical events were portrayed with the truth of nature and the poetry
of mind. The voice now awakened my attention by saying, "You have now
before you the vision of that state of society which is an object of
admiration to the youth of modern times, and the recollections of which,
and the precepts founded on these recollections, constitute an important
part of your education. Your maxims of war and policy, your taste in
letters and the arts, are derived from models left by that people, or by
their immediate imitators, whom you shall now see." I opened my eyes,
and recognised the very spot in which I was sitting when the vision
commenced. I was on the top of an arcade under a silken canopy, looking
down upon the tens of thousands of people who were crowded in the seats
of the Colosaeum, ornamented with all the spoils that the wealth of a
world can give; I saw in the arena below animals of the most
extraordinary kind, and which have rarely been seen living in modern
Europe--the giraffe, the zebra, the rhinoceros, and the ostrich from the
deserts of Africa beyond the Niger, the hippopotamus from the Upper Nile,
and the royal tiger and the gnu from the banks of the Ganges. Looking
over Rome, which, in its majesty of palaces and temples, and in its
colossal aqueducts bringing water even from the snows of the distant
Apennines, seemed more like the creation of a supernatural power than the
work of human hands; looking over Rome to the distant landscape, I saw
the whole face, as it were, of the ancient world adorned with miniature
images of this splendid metropolis. Where the Roman conquered, there he
civilised; where he carried his arms, there he fixed likewise his
ho