"(and may God avert the omen!) the same ruin may
be accomplished still earlier, and by more potent causes. Her nobles
enervated by luxury, her lower classes sunk in vice and ignorance,
and both the one and the other decaying in piety and religion (a sure
result of neglecting that Bible which has directly and indirectly formed
her strength), she may have fallen a victim to the consequences of her
own degeneracy, or to an irresistible combination of the enemies who
envy and hate her. That picture of the splendid imagination of the great
historian of our day may be realized, 'when some traveller from New
Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a
broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.'"

"In short," resumed Harrington, "in several ways that appalling
catastrophe may have taken place; and, should this be the case, how
many questions will be asked of history, but asked in vain! As for
Rome,--what other great name in the present strife pitted against
England,--for aught we can tell, she may by that time be in desolation
far more remediless than when the grim Attilas and Alarics stormed her
walls. For aught we know, the agency of those terrible elements which
more or less mine the soil of Italy may have made her 'like unto'
Herculaneum or Pompeii; or that silent desolater, the malaria, which
Dr. Arnold thinks will be perpetual and will increase, may long before
that period have reduced, not only the Campagna of Rome, but the whole
region of the 'seven hills,' to a pestilential solitude."

"But all this is mere vision?" said Robinson.

"Certainly; but it is the vision of the possible. Similarly wonderful
and equally unexpected revolutions have taken place in the history of
past nations and empires in a less space of time; and some enormous
changes, we know, must happen during the next eighteen hundred and fifty
years; and they will tend both to jostle out thousands of events of meaner
moment, and to effect a comparative destruction of the memorials of the
past. You do not suppose, I presume, that London and Rome are absolutely
privileged from the fate which has overtaken Babylon and Memphis. I, for
one, therefore, do not expect that the time will arrive when, in the
historic investigations of the past, our Strausses will not find abundant
scope for ingenious theories; nay, many real sources of perplexity even
in reference to events which, at the time of their occurrence, seemed