The world does not start fair in the race of time: one country has run its course before another has set out or even been heard of. Riches, luxury, and the arts, reach their utmost height in one place, while the rest of the globe is in a crude and barbarous state; decline thenceforward, and can no more be resuscitated than the dead. The twelve old Etruscan cities are stone-walls, surrounded with heaps of cinders: Rome is but the tomb of its ancient greatness. Venice, Genoa, are extinct; and there are those who think that England has had her day. She may exclaim in the words of Gray’s _Bard_—‘To triumph and to die are mine.’ America is just setting out in the path of history, on the model of England, without a language of its own, and with a continent instead of an island to run its career in—like a novice in the art, who gets a larger canvass than his master ever had to cover with his second-hand designs. XLIX It was shrewdly observed that the ruin of states commences with the accumulation of people in great cities, which conceal and foster vice and profligacy. L The world, said a sensible man, does not on the whole grow much worse, nor abandon itself to absolute licentiousness, because as people have children growing up, they do not wish them to be reprobates; but give them good advice and conceal their failings from them. This in each successive generation brings morality on its legs again, however sceptical in virtue or hardened in vice the old may become through habit or bad example. LI As children puzzle you by asking explanations of what they do not understand, many grown people shine in company and triumph over their antagonists by dint of ignorance and conceit. LII A certain bookseller wanted Northcote to write a history of art in all ages and countries, and in all its ramifications and collateral bearings. It would have taken a life to execute it; but the projector thought it was as easy to make the book as to draw up the title-page. Some minds are as sanguine from a want of imagination, as others are from an excess of it; they see no difficulty or objection in the way of what they undertake, and are blind to every thing but their own interest and wishes. LIII