the theme of those old nations. By the might of his graphic pen let him evoke them and their crumbled empires from the dust, and place them in their pristine glory before the eye of the reader. Let him paint the people, the land in which they dwelt, the temples in which they worshipped;-let him glance with graphic touch over the leading points of their history, the master-spirits who influenced, and the poets who adorned it ;— let him depict the arts of life and the arts of beauty which characterised them; and, hardest task of all, let him dive into the depths of their religion and philosophy-not the fantastic crust of superstition, but the more spiritual dogmas which lie below; and, wasting but little time upon what was false, set himself to eliminate the true, and place it once more before the world.

In this way let him paint the Chinese, stout, square-set, and supple,—ever labouring contentedly in their rice-fields, and delighting in social intercourse; but also, with a free and martial spirit, of which the world is now incredulous, repelling with slaughter the nomade hordes of Central Asia which subsequently overthrew the mighty empires of the West. Let him depict the country covered with district-schools, and the people trained in social morals by a Government system of education, centuries before the birth of Christ. Let him set forth the practical good sense and kindliness of spirit which characterise the inhabitants of that vast empire, as well as their eminence in the social and industrial arts of life; yet glance with brief but warning words at the materialistic tendencies, alike in creed and practice, by which those good qualities have been in some degree counterbalanced.

Or turn to the Hindoo, with his slim and graceful figure, symbolising the fine and susceptible spirit within. See him among the flowery woods, luxuriant vegetation, and countless sparkling waters of the Indian land,—so spiritual and alive to the impressions of the external world, that he feels bound in lively sympathy with every living thing around him, whether

it be beast or bird, tree or flower,—and in the faith of the most imaginative pantheism that the world ever saw, regarding himself and all created forms as incarnations of the Deity, animated directly by the spirit of the great Creator; and, a firm believer in the transmigration of souls, regarding every object around him with plaintive tenderness, as possibly the dwelling of the soul of some lost friend or relative. See him under his master-sentiment of love. That passion, almost universally in the ancient world, was a mere thirst of the senses; and the few instances in which it figures in the literature of Greece and Rome, it is made to strike its victims like a frenzy. But among the Hindoos we perceive it often sweetened and refined by sentiment,-a spiritual as well as a sensuous yearning,-purer, as ardent, more pervading than the love-passion of contemporaneous nations. And the same spirituality of nature which made the Hindoo thus, fitted him also for the subtlest and loftiest flights of speculation,-savouring little of the utilitarian, indeed, but tending to gratify the soul in many of its highest and purest aspirations. Caste, unknown in China, was in India all-prevalent; and there, also, we meet in its sternest form that spirit of devoted asceticism, by which the mystics of the East, and subordinately in the Christian Church, have striven to exalt themselves above the level of humanity, by extinguishing all earthly passion, and so drawing into nearer communion with the Deity.

Or pass to Egypt, and behold the now desolate valley-land of the Nile reinvested with its old splendour and fertility. Let a thousand irrigating canals spread again over the surface, reclothing the land with verdure; while up from the sands spring miles of temples, pyramids, and endless avenues of sphinxes, obelisks, and gigantic statues. Let Thebes with its "hundred gates," its libraries, and stately palaces,-and Memphis with its immense population, whose bones are still seen whitening the desert sands whereon the city once bloomed amidst verdure,reappear with crowds of artisans and professional men, carrying

the division of labour almost as far as it is done in modern times; while, all around, a rural population is tending herds or tilling the thrice-fertile soil; and, wearily and worn, innumerable bands of captives - Nubians from the south, Negroes from the desert, Arabs from across the Red Sea, Syrians and Assyrians from Euphrates to the foot of Mount Taurus-are toiling in digging canals, in making bricks, or in quarrying, transporting, or raising to their place, those huge blocks of granite which fill with astonishment the engineers of our own times. Turn from all this pomp and bustle and busy hum of life, along that silent mile-long avenue of double sphinxes; and, passing beneath the stupendous ornamented portals of Karnac or Luxor, or some other temple of the land, enter the vast halls and countless apartments devoted to sacerdotal seclusion,-where the white-robed priests of the Nile, bathing three times a-day to maintain mental purity and calm, engaged in the abstract sciences, or searched deep into the secrets of nature for that magical power by which they fascinated and subjugated the minds of the people, and which enabled them to contend on almost equal terms with the divinely-commissioned champion of the Hebrews.

Or turn the eye northward, and see the Persian preparing to descend from his mountains and conquer the world. Verdant valleys amidst sterile hills and sandy plains are his home, -blazed over by a sun to whose bright orb he kneels in adoration as an emblem of the Deity. Hardy, handsome, chivalrous, luxurious, despotic, and ambitious,—yet animated by a spirit of justice, and by a religious belief so pure as at once to sympathise with that of the Hebrews, and to win for the Persian monarch the title of the "Servant of God;" they are the first in history to exhibit a nation, few in numbers, but strong in arms and wisdom, lording it over an immense tract of country, and over subjugated tribes-Syrians, Assyrians, Asiatic Greeks, and Egyptians-of diverse origin and customs from themselves. The iron phalanx of Alexander at

length caused this empire of satrapies to crumble into the dust; but under a new dynasty it revived again, so as to wage war successfully even with the all-conquering legions of Rome.

Away, around the shores of the lovely Egean-on the sunny slopes of Asia Minor, among the sparkling vine-clad islets of the Cyclades, and on the rocky picturesque bay-indented peninsula of Greece, the gay and martial Hellenic race disported themselves. As a race, young, imaginative, superstitious, and enamoured of the beautiful, they ascribed every phenomenon in nature to the action of a god,—peopled the woods, the hills, the waters, with graceful imaginary beings sympathising with and often visible to man, and filling even the highest heaven with divinities who were gods but in power, and wholly men in passion. Keenly alive to pleasure, and hearing little of the deeper voices of the soul, their thoughts clung wholly to the beautiful world around them; and, while acknowledging the soul's immortality, they ever looked upon Elysium, their world beyond the grave, as a shadowy land where joy becomes so diluted as hardly to be worth the having. The greatest poets the world ever saw, they embodied their conceptions, alike in literature, in architecture, and the plastic arts, in forms of such divine beauty, that after-ages have abandoned in despair even the hope of rivalling them. The story of Greece is not easily told; she excelled in so many departments of human effort— producing almost simultaneously an Alexander, a Socrates, a Plato, a Demosthenes, an Aristotle-not to speak of a Democritus, a Thales, an Anaxagoras, and others, in whose daring but vaguely-framed systems of the universe are to be found not a few brilliant anticipations of world-wide truth, which modern science is now recovering, and placing on the firm and only definite basis of experiment.

Add to the story of these nations that of the Romans-the great conquerors and legislators,-the story of a city that came to throw its chains over the world,-and thence pass over the dying ashes of Paganism into the new world of Christianity,

and to the congeries of kingdoms which arose under its beneficent sway in medieval Europe, at first small, and never presenting those great contrasts so observable in the old empires of Paganism, but each telling its lesson to those who study it, and some of them already influencing the fortunes of the human race to an extent never possible or dreamt of in prior times. The "meteor-flag" of England is the great object which, in these latter days, arrests the eye of the philosophic observer,— bridging over the seas, peopling continents and islands with civilised man, and carrying the science, the religion, and the beneficent sway of Great Britain over an empire upon which the sun never sets, and to climes "where Cæsar's eagles never flew."

Paradoxical as it may seem, the further we recede from the era of those old nations, the better able are we becoming to write their history and understand their civilisation. Not only are mankind becoming tolerant of truth in whatever attire it present itself, and thus learning to sympathise with, and so comprehend, those old forms of civilisation, but the recent study of the languages of India and China has opened up to us the literature and life of those old countries. The discovery of a clue to the hieroglyphics of Egypt, to the rock-inscriptions of Persia, and to the arrow-headed chronicles of Assyria, constitutes a series of unexpected triumphs, which promises to rend the veil of oblivion from the face of those long-perished empires. Lastly, the earth herself has been giving us back their skeletons. Two old Roman cities, Herculaneum and Pompeii, accidentally discovered, have been cleared of their superincumbent mass of lava and ashes, and given back to the light precisely as they stood on the day when the eruption of Vesuvius overwhelmed them eighteen hundred years ago. Into those long-buried streets we have descended, and seen the domestic civilisation of imperial Rome mirrored in those hastily-abandoned boudoirs and dining-rooms, baths, temples, and public buildings. In the wastes of Persia, Chardin stumbled