The opportuneness of these revelations of the past cannot but strike one as remarkable. Knowledge revealed too early is lost. Steam, the compass, gunpowder, the principle of the electric telegraph, and a hundred other discoveries made of old might be mentioned, which, in consequence of mankind not being ready for them, wholly dropt out of mind again, or languished on as mere toys or curiosities. And had those old cities been unbared at some earlier period, would they not most lamentably have shared the fate of the monuments which remained above ground—been wantonly destroyed by a barbarous population, or been used as quarries, from whence the degenerate successors of the elder race might indolently draw their building materials? But the earth took them into her own safe keeping, and covered them up until the world had grown older and wiser, and knew how to prize such monuments of memorable but long-forgotten times. Of all the great empires which have enduringly impressed themselves upon the world’s memory, no one has perished leaving so few visible marks of its existence as that which first rose into greatness in the land of Assyria. It was this memorable region which gave birth to the first of the old “universal empires.” On the plains of Shinar, on the banks of the Lower Euphrates, a community of civilised men was assembled more than four thousand years ago. There, in course of time, arose Babylon, with its impregnable walls, behind which the city might eat and drink and be merry, though the mightiest of ancient hosts were encamped outside. There were the fabled hanging-gardens, the wonder of the world, erected by one of its monarchs to please his young Median bride, whose heart yearned for the hills and groves of her native land. Towering above all was the vast temple of Belus, unequalled for magnificence in the ancient world,—crowned with its gigantic golden statue of the sun-god, rising so high, and flashing so brightly in the upper air, that to the crowds below it seemed invested with the splendours of the deity whom it symbolised. But more than two thousand years have elapsed since all this grandeur came to a sudden end; and so thoroughly has the city mouldered into the dust, and so completely has it buried itself in its own ruins, that during the recent excavations executed on its site, scarcely a detached figure in stone, or a solitary tablet, says Mr Layard, was dug out of the vast heaps of rubbish. “Babylon is fallen, is fallen! and all the graven images of her gods He hath broken unto the ground.”