which the people had no share in bringing about, and if the power and direction of thought depend upon conformation of brain as there seems every reason to believe, a change of thought so entire and lasting may be accompanied by infinitesimal change of structure.

It is certain that changes take place by which whole races perish off. So completely and rapidly has this ensued even within the period of written history, that over great part of the earth there is nowhere a large tract of country on which a bygone empire has not left its traces or even held its seat; growing from a rude horde of warriors and hunters till men felt the necessity for laws; crushing every rival by war or policy; guarding every point with skill; handing down the memory of its great deeds by inscriptions on the stone and rock, and then in every case just as it attained the greatest height of splendour and power, it began to decay, as the sun only towers above the crest of the mountain to sink into the shadow of the valley or be quenched in the ocean.

66

Quicquid ad summum pervenit ad exitium prope est.”

The causes to which this decay is usually ascribed seem to me to be quite inadequate to account for it. Luxury, corruption of manners, effeminacy, are the means generally spoken of; debauchery of manners is a favourite cause with some writers. But luxury in the proper sense of the word was never greater at Athens or Rome than it now is in Paris or London. If by corruption of manners (I borrow the phrase) is meant the same thing as debauchery, it is impossible to reconcile the view with the fact that many

most flourishing nations have passed through long periods of debauchery which it would be hard to exceed. Let any one examine the revolting pictures of the excesses under the regent Orleans, the court of Francis the First, those of Louis the Fourteenth and Fifteenth, and even the time of Henry the Fourth, the scandalous license of english manners as portrayed in the pages of the "Spectator" and other writers of that day, the universal drunkenness that prevailed throughout England and if possible more generally in Scotland to within a very recent period, and say if Carthage or Thebes could have revealed more degrading scenes. As to effeminacy we never see it spread except among nations on the decline; in England it may be said to have gone out of date; the mincing fops and beaux of Pope and Richardson, the dandies of George the Fourth's day, are passed away to return no more, and therefore here the cause certainly existed without the effect. I have touched upon this subject already, but as the belief is so widely spread, I will at the risk of being thought tedious adduce another instance opposed to what I consider an untenable view.

The fall of Persia was even more mysterious and sudden than that of Rome. Within fifty-two years the hardy warriors who had conquered the vast forces of Babylon and overrun the city itself, had sunk into such universal depravity and cowardice, that hardly any number of them could be made to assail a determined phalanx of greeks. For a time indeed the strong hand of Cyrus kept things together. His wonderful administrative and fiscal genius, his vigilance and integrity prevented at any rate the decay from showing

itself, but at his death, the fall of the empire was like that of a glacier, which has been stayed in its headlong course while the melting of the ice below has made its downward path more easy and rapid. Now it is scarcely very probable that there was any material difference in the food of Babylon and Persia, nor is the climate of the conquered province more enervating than that of the other. As to luxury having effected this change I must say I am rather puzzled at the very outset to define what luxury is. If it means eating rich food and drinking too much wine, sleeping on soft couches and wearing fine garments, I think from what we know of the habits of the wealthy in England and France we may dismiss the idea as unworthy of a second thought, and it is very doubtful if ever the mass of the people were in a position to indulge in such things except just after the sack of some town. Besides the thin poor wines of those days could never have done much harm to a healthy race, and if they had drunk tokay and curaçoa every day, it is impossible to imagine a whole people being ruined in five hundred years by such a cause.

Sir Archibald Alison would have us believe that the stay of states is the valour and patriotism, the virtue and religion, of a few of the ruling class. Let us try the case of Rome by this test. The six princes who flourished between Domitian and Commodus have been eulogized as a group of unequalled minds, as an unbroken chain of virtuous, pious, learned men.* The life of Adrian was one long toil to repair the roads, bridges, ports, and towns of the great empire, to

Bacon: Advancement of Learning.

improve its irrigation and navigation, its trade and policy. Yet these efforts did not even stay the downward course of Rome. The fact is the race had grown old; the piety and wisdom of old age will not keep an empire together. Their learning was like that of the monastery and schoolmen; Adrian desired to comprehend all things; Antoninus who followed him would carve an argument into atoms; Marcus Aurelius who followed him was a sort of angel as well as a philosopher, but in not one of them do we see a trace of a Scipio or a Romulus.

A much more plausible argument is that advanced by Gillies, Alison himself, and others;-viz. the invariable ruin that ensues from the hasty adoption of democratic views of government. That ruin ever has followed and ever will follow, the falling of government into the hands of the people is, so far as we can judge by the past, an absolute certainty, but this seems to me more the way or mode in which a people decline than the cause. Absolute governments have fallen just as often. Indeed free government seems to me an offspring of the mind, of the physical form of the brain, and just as inborn in every succeeding race in some countries, as it is utterly foreign to the immutable people of the east.

A man of genius must not on any account have eminent children. An illustrious house is quite allowable; a line of Rollos,* of Vernets or Bayards,† of Scipios or Plantagenets, but not of Newtons or Shaksperes; we may have the wit of the Sheridans, that is so far as the reader likes to credit the tales about

* Acton Warburton.

+ Histoire de France, par le père Daniel, t. x. p. 140.

over.

wit, but we shall not have that of Falstaff twice Even the first class succumb to the prolonged action of the law; Horace Vernet is just dead and with him dies the race of the Vernets; he had no son, and his only daughter, who married Paul Delaroche, died childless in 1845.

What seems strange is that the very bent of mind which most distinguishes the sire is often least shown in the son. We see the great Mushirwan Chosroes, the conqueror of Justinian, the dreaded rival of Belisarius, whose reign is extolled by the poets as the golden age of persian rule, succeeded by the wretched Hormizdas, a cruel, vain, degraded beast. The son of the proud and able Ifa Mahomet Khan weak and imbecile; the race of Charlemagne, as of so many great soldiers and rulers, little better than sots and fools; Richard Cromwell, the son of the lion-hearted daring Protector, a simple-minded squire contented to live as plain as Mr. Clarke of Cheshunt; the son of the brave incorruptible De Foe a mean villain; the darling child of Napoleon, born king of immortal Rome, to whom the conqueror of eleven monarchies bequeathed a mighty lineage and an early tomb, satisfied with a colonelcy in the army of Austria, a country in all ages without the ambition of conquest or arts, the natural foe of France and Italy; the daughter of the sturdy Milton, infirm and unlettered; the heir of Lord Eldon mad ;* the son of the polished Chesterfield an incurable booby; the brave and resolute Henry the Fourth followed by the feeble Louis the Thirteenth, a puppet in the hands of his favourites.t

*Times, January 17, 1853.

Life of Henry IV. by G. P. R. James.