There is a peculiar grandeur and impressiveness in the ruins which date from the era of the old universal monarchies. So many centuries have rolled away since then, conquest and desolation have so often swept over their territories, and tyranny so decimated their inhabitants, that among them Decay assumes a grander form than elsewhere in the world. It is not single edifices dilapidated that meet our view, but whole cities desolate--whole cities so crumbled into dust, that the very sites of some of the greatest of ancient capitals have slipped from the world's memory. Egypt, Greece, Persia, the Assyrian realm, are great names, once filling earth with their glory, now all but obliterated from the roll of nations. We enter the regions where once sat those old Queens of the East, and look for some reflection of former greatness still lingering on the brows of the inhabitants. We look in vain. Cities are mean; poverty is everywhere; man is degraded, nature half desolate, and the testimony of our senses makes us sceptical as to the truth of history. But search yet further, and lo! silent and inanimate witnesses for the dead rise around. Amid the solitude and the desert, pillar and obelisk, palace and temple, cities immense even in their ruins, mark how the barren sands were once a garden, and the solitude was peopled by busy myriads. Those shattered colonnades, those fallen capitals and mutilated statues, once rose above the dwellings of Hundred-gated Thebes; those mounds of rubbish, now shunned even by the wild Bedouin, cover the wondrous relics of Nineveh; those silent mountains that look down on the lone, ruin-covered plain of Merdusht, once echoed back the shouts of royal Persepolis. Ruins are the voice of past ages chiding the present for its degeneracy. They are like sea-ware on the shore at low water, marking how high the tide of civilisation once rose.