igorously linked together, are attached
to the definitions and axioms of abstract justice. A scale of grades,
one above the other, which everybody may ascend from the first to the
last; titles of nobility more and more advanced, suited to more and more
advanced functions; spectabiles, illustres, clarissimi, perfectissimi,
analogous to Napoleon's Barons, Counts, Dukes, and Princes. A programme
of promotion once exhibiting, and on which are still seen, common
soldiers, peasants, a shepherd, a barbarian, the son of a cultivator
(colon), the grandson of a slave, mounting gradually upward to the
highest dignities, becoming patrician, Count, Duke, commander of the
cavalry, Caesar, Augustus, and donning the imperial purple, enthroned
amid the most sumptuous magnificence and the most elaborate ceremonial
prostrations, a being called God during his lifetime, and after
death adored as a divinity, and dead or alive, a complete divinity on
earth.[2336]

So colossal an edifice, so admirably adjusted, so mathematical, could
not wholly perish; its hewn stones were too massive, too nicely squared;
too exactly fitted, and the demolisher's hammer could not reach down
to its deepest foundations.--This one, through its shaping and its
structure, through its history and its duration, resembles the stone
edifices which the same people at the same epoch elevated on the same
soil, the aqueducts, amphitheatres, and triumphal arches, the Coliseum,
the baths of Diocletian and of Caracalla.

The medieval man, using their intact foundations and their shattered
fragments, built here and there, haphazard, according to the necessities
of the moment, planting his Gothic towers between Corinthian columns
against the panels of walls still standing.[2337] But, under his
incoherent masonry, he observed the beautiful forms, the precious
marbles, the architectural combinations, the symmetrical taste of an
anterior and superior art; he felt that his own work was rude. The new
world, to all thinking minds, was miserable compared with the old one;
its languages seemed a patois (crude dialect), its literature mere
stammering or driveling, its law a mass of abuses or a mere routine, its
feudality anarchy, and its social arrangements, disorder.--In vain had
the medieval man striven to escape through all issues, by the temporal
road and by the spiritual road, by the universal and absolute monarchy
of the German Cesars, and by the universal and absolute monarchy of