It is scarcely theoretical to say, that every century has a character of its own. The human mind is essentially progressive in Europe. The accumulations of past knowledge, experience, and impulse, are perpetually preparing changes on the face of society; and we may fairly regard every hundred years as the period maturing those changes into visible form. Thus, the fifteenth century was the age of discovery in the arts, in the powers of nature, and in the great provinces of the globe: the sixteenth exhibited the general mind under the impressions of religion--the Reformation, the German wars for liberty and faith, and the struggles of Protestantism in France. The seventeenth was the brilliant period of scientific advance, of continental literature, and of courtly pomp and power. The eighteenth was the period of politics; every court of Europe was engaged in the game of political rivalry; the European balance became the test, the labour, and the triumph of statesmanship. The negotiator was then the great instrument of public action. Diplomacy assumed a shape, and Europe was governed by despatches. The genius of Frederick the Second restored war to its early rank among the elements of national life; but brilliant as his wars were, they were subservient to the leading feature of the age. They were fought, not, like the battles of the old conquerors, for fame, but for influence--not to leave the king without an enemy, but to leave his ambassadors without an opponent--less to gain triumphs, than to ensure treaties: they all began and ended in diplomacy! It is remarkable, that this process was exhibited in Europe alone. In the East, comprehending two-thirds of human kind, no change was made since the conquests of Mahomet. That vast convulsion, in which the nervousness of frenzy had given the effeminate spirit of the Oriental the strength of the soldier and the ambition of universal conqueror, had no sooner wrought its purpose than it passed away, leaving the general mind still more exhausted than before. The Saracen warrior sank into the peasant, and the Arab was again lost in his sands; the Turk alone survived, exhibiting splendour without wealth, and pride without power--a decaying image of Despotism, which nothing but the jealousy of the European saved from falling under the first assault. Such is the repressive strength of evil government; progress, the most salient principle of our nature, dies before it. And man, of all beings the most eager for acquirement, and the most restless under all monotony of time, place, and position, becomes like the dog or the mule, and generation after generation lives and dies with no more consciousness of the capacities of his existence, than the root which the animal devours, or the tree under which it was born.