She (the Roman Catholic Church) may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler 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. Macaulay, Ranke’s History of the Popes.
The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will perhaps be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveler from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra:—but am I not prophesying contrary to my consummate prudence, and casting horoscopes of empires like Rousseau?
Horace Walpole, Letter to Mason.
Readers of Don Juan sometimes descant with rapture on the beauty of the lines (c. i. v. 123),—
’Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog’s honest bark
Bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home,—
The epithet deep-mouthed, as applied to the bark, being especially designated as “fine.” And fine it is, but Byron found it in Shakspeare and in Goldsmith:—
And couple Clowder with the deep-mouthed brach.