All analogy _must_ be imperfect in detail; and we have no desire to insist on the perfection of our analogy between the Golden Head of the East, and the little kingdom whose fallen honours are recorded in the volume before us. But, if Ireland is even now neither the _nominis umbra_ which the Assyrian empire has been for so many ages, nor the Irish legislature the heir of the fierce and falcon-eyed council which sleeps in the sepulchres of Nineveh, there is something of a curious relationship in the adventurous industry which has so lately exhumed the monuments of Eastern grandeur, and the patriotic reminiscence which has retrieved the true glories of the sister country, the examples of her genius, from an oblivion alike resulting from the misfortunes of the Land and the lapse of Time. Nor are we altogether inclined to admit the inferiority of the moral catastrophe of the Island to the physical fall of the Empire. If there be an inferiority, we should place it on the side of the Oriental throne. To us, all that belongs to mind assumes the higher rank; the soil trodden by the philosopher and the patriot, the birthplace of the poet and the orator, bears a prouder aspect, is entitled to a more reverent homage, and creates richer recollections in the coming periods of mankind, than all the pomp of unintellectual power. There would be to us a stronger claim in the fragments of an Athenian tomb, or in the thicket-covered wall of a temple in the Ægean, than in all the grandeurs of Babylon. It is now fifty years since the parliament of Ireland fell; and, in that period, there has not been a more disturbed, helpless, and hopeless country than Ireland, on the face of the earth. Nor has this calamity been confined to the lower orders; every order has been similarly convulsed. The higher professions have languished and lost their lustre; the Church has been exposed to a struggle for life; the nobility have given up the useless resistance to difficulties increasing round them from hour to hour; the landed interest is supplicating the Court of Encumbered Estates to relieve it from its burthens; the farmers are hurrying, in huge streams of fugitives, from a land in which they can no longer live; and the tillers of the ground, the serfs of the spade, are left to the dangerous teaching of an angry priesthood, or to the death of mingled famine and pestilence. A cloud, which seems to stoop lower day by day, and through which no ray can pierce, at once chills and darkens Ireland.