ld consecrated by the blood of a Hamden or a Falkland?
and where the Iona which is so eloquent with recollections as the walls
which have echoed to the voices of a Ridley and a Barrow?

It is true indeed, that the recollections of many other lands, as
associated with their monuments, lay much stronger hold upon the
imagination than those of England. Of the former we might say that there
was about them more of the element of poetry; of the latter, that they
furnish an ampler share of materials for reflection. One great moral, 'the
comprehensive text of the Hebrew preacher,' the invariable 'vanity of
vanities,' is alike inscribed upon all the vestiges of human greatness.
For the rest, a serene and touching beauty lingers around and hallows
every relic which attests the hand of Phidias, or marks the country of
Pericles and Epaminondas. No lapse of time, no process of decay, will ever
wholly exorcise that spirit of stateliness and command which sits
enthroned amid the ruins of the 'Eternal City,' as her own Marius once
sate amid the ruins of a rival capital. But in all that regards a common
standard of opinions, institutions and interests, and in the facility of
reasoning as respects these, from the experience and practice of one time
and people to those of another, we cannot but feel that a vast gulf has
interposed between our own age and that which is commemorated by the
monuments of Greece and Rome. The venerable genius of antiquity, seated
among crumbling arches and broken columns, has but little to say to us
respecting those questions which most deeply agitate and unceasingly
perplex the busy and the thinking part of mankind at the present day. No
response are we to expect from that quarter, concerning our bank-laws and
our corn-laws; our systems of credit and of commerce; our endless
disquisitions on the balance of power and of parties, on the rights of
suffrage and of conscience. While we reserve to the theorist the privilege
of adorning his theme by allusions to the polity of Lycurgus and Numa, we
are sensible that the practical statesman who trusts himself to such
examples will be constantly liable to be deluded by false parallels and
imperfect analogies. A voice, like that which is said to have startled the
mariner of old on the coasts of Ionia, and to have announced to him the
cessation of oracles, comes to us from all the remains of pagan antiquity,
warning us that the spirit of that ancient civilization has depar