But however this may be, no one can well contemplate in earnest these relics of a most curious and refined civilisation—in some respects perhaps the most curious and refined which the world has ever seen—and return with satisfaction to the coarse generalisation of the disciples of universal progress in the affairs of humanity, with whose speculations we have been lately surfeited. The feelings which such inquiries excite are assuredly more akin to those with which they inspired the proud and melancholy Leopardi, when he turned from them and from the wealth of conception and nobleness of sentiment with which the ancient world abounded, to that long degradation of subsequent ages, out of which humanity is in truth only now emerging. Very grand, though profoundly sorrowful, are those lines of his, entitled ‘Bruto minore,’ in which he portrays the expiring patriot, not as bewailing his present catastrophe, nor calling on the gods for present revenge, but as brooding, in utter hopelessness of spirit, over “the dark _forward_ and abysm of time”—the Erebus-like blackness of that prospect of coming degeneracy and decay: the trance of ages, into which the human soul was about to fall. “In peggio Precipitano i tempi: e mal s’affida Ai putridi nipoti L’onor d’egregie menti, e la suprema De’ miseri vendetta.” For the duration of that era of decline was indeed such as we are sufficiently accustomed to measure backwards, in historical reflection; but such as, when contemplated as a future, the conception shrinks from with a painful sense of incapacity. Thirteen centuries were to elapse ere the first Italian could stretch his hand across the chasm to the last Roman. As the paradise of cultivation, in which those Campanian cities nestled, was separated from the fertile aspect of the same region in modern times by a formidable blank of centuries of duration, so was the ancient civilisation from the modern by a similar space of intellectual desert; and in each instance alike, the succeeding age can scarcely appreciate its predecessor as a reality. “Credetne virûm ventura propago, Cum segetes iterum, cum jam hæc deserta virebunt, Infra urbes populosque premi.”