chinery along which
electricity was to perform its marvellous exploits, railways have
directly contributed to apply and develop the resources of one of
the most useful and wonderful of inventions, which even in its first
stage of infancy has wrought a perfect revolution in the mode of
transmitting intelligence; and which promises at no very distant day
to play the same part among the continents and islands of the globe
that it now does between the provinces of an empire.

THE LAST OF THE PALAEOLOGI.

It would be a curious historical problem to trace the families of
emperors and kings, of heroes and conquerors, from the era of their
decline and fall to their ultimate extinction. Some 'Old Mortality'
might find as congenial employment in this field of sepulchral
research as did the original in clearing up the decayed and
moss-grown tombs of the Covenanters. The genealogist makes it his
business rather to flatter the great by blazoning the antiquity of
their pedigrees, than to teach the world a moral lesson on the
instability of earthly grandeur, by chronicling their reverses. Yet
the churchyard has its heraldry, from whose records wisdom might be
extracted for the benefit of the living.

What dynasty in ancient times held a prouder or wider sway than the
illustrious masters of the Roman world? The solid fabric of their
power was the growth of nearly a thousand years, and it cost about
thirteen centuries of revolutions and barbaric invasions before it
was undermined and finally extinguished. If its earlier annals were
disgraced by the crimes of a Tiberius, a Nero, and a Domitian, they
could boast of the virtues and abilities of a Titus, a Trajan, a
Nerva, a Hadrian, the two Antonini, &c.; though it must be admitted
that latterly the balance sadly preponderated on the side of vice
and corruption. If a Justinian or a Constantine appeared, his reign
was but a sunbeam in the midst of the universal degeneracy; or if a
ray of splendour was shed on the empire by his virtues or his
victories, the transient glory was speedily dispelled by irruptions
from without, or intrigue and revolt within. Gradually the work of
decay proceeded, until the vast expanse of the imperial conquests
was contracted to a few provinces, whose capital had been
transferred to the shores of the Bosphorus. A languishing existence
of about six centuries and a half--that is, from the revival of the
western empire in 800 by Charlemagne, to the takin