Add to the story of these nations that of the Roman—the great conquerors and legislators,—the story of a city that came to throw its chains over the world,—and thence pass over the dying ashes of Paganism into the new world of Christianity, and to the congeries of kingdoms which arose under its beneficent sway in mediæval Europe, at first small, and never presenting those great contrasts so observable in the old empires of Paganism, but each telling its lesson to those who study it, and some of them already influencing the fortunes of the human race to an extent never possible or dreamt of in prior times. The “meteor-flag” of England is the great object which, in these latter days, arrests the eye of the philosophic observer,—bridging over the seas, peopling continents and islands with civilised man,—and carrying the science, the religion, and the beneficent sway of Great Britain over an empire upon which the sun never sets, and to climes “where Cæsar’s eagles never flew.” Paradoxical as it may seem, the further we recede from the era of those old nations, the better able are we becoming to write their history and understand their civilisation. Not only are mankind becoming tolerant of truth in whatever attire it present itself, and thus learning to sympathise with, and so comprehend, those old forms of civilisation, but the recent study of the languages of India and China have opened up to us the literature and life of those old countries. The discovery of a clue to the hieroglyphics of Egypt, to the rock-inscriptions of Persia, and to the arrow-headed chronicles of Assyria, constitutes a series of unexpected triumphs, which promises to rend the veil of oblivion from the face of those long-perished empires. Lastly, the earth herself has been giving us back their skeletons. Two old Roman cities, Herculaneum and Pompeii, accidentally discovered, have been cleared of their superincumbent mass of lava and ashes, and given back to the light precisely as they stood on the day when the eruption of Vesuvius overwhelmed them eighteen hundred years ago. Into those long-buried streets we have descended, and seen the domestic civilisation of imperial Rome mirrored in those hastily-abandoned boudoirs and dining-rooms, baths, temples, and public buildings. In the wastes of Persia, Chardin stumbled upon the ruins of imperial Persepolis, whose very site had for ages dropt out of the world’s memory. The thousand monuments of Egypt have been studied, their historic sculptures and mural paintings magnificently copied, and a portrait-gallery published of its ancient dynasties. Finally, Layard and Botta have carried the thirst of discovery to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, and have exhumed from the mounds of long-lost Nineveh striking and instructive vestiges of the first of the so-called “universal” empires.