XLVIII
The world does not start fair in the race of time: one country has run its course before another has set out or even been heard of. Riches, luxury, and the arts, reach their utmost height in one place, while the rest of the globe is in a crude and barbarous state; decline thenceforward, and can no more be resuscitated than the dead. The twelve old Etruscan cities are stone-walls, surrounded with heaps of cinders: Rome is but the tomb of its ancient greatness. Venice, Genoa, are extinct; and there are those who think that England has had her day. She may exclaim in the words of Gray’s Bard—‘To triumph and to die are mine.’ America is just setting out in the path of history, on the model of England, without a language of its own, and with a continent instead of an island to run its career in—like a novice in the art, who gets a larger canvass than his master ever had to cover with his second-hand designs.