“I doubt that.  Has there been any lack of historic controversy respecting a thousand facts which have transpired since the press was in full activity?  You forget, that, in the first place, neither the press, nor any thing else, can preserve any original documents.  Time will not be inactive in the future more than in the past; it will have no more respect for printed books than for manuscripts.  An immense mass of print is every year silently perishing by mere decay.  The original documents to which you refer will, eighteen hundred years hence, have almost all perished; few will be preserved except in copies, and how many disputes that alone will cause, it is hard to say; but we may form some guess from the experience of the past.  Of thousands of these documents, again, no importance having been attached to them, and no one having imagined that any importance would ever be attached to them, no copies will have been taken, and there will be here again the usual field for conjectures.  This is a common trick of time;—­silently destroying what a present age thinks may as well be left to his maw.  It is not even discovered that valuable documents are lost, till something turns up to make mankind wish they may be found.  But neither is this the sole nor the chief source of future historic doubts.  Do not flatter yourself too much on the wonders which the press can work, amongst which one unquestionably is, that it will bury at least as much as it will preserve.  Several considerations will suffice to show that here, too, we labor under a delusion.  Oblivion will practically cover many events, owing to the mere accumulations of the press itself.  You talk of the ease of consulting ‘original documents’; but when they lie buried in the depths of national museums, amidst mountain loads of forgotten and decaying literature, it will not be so easy, even supposing the present activity of the press only maintained for eighteen hundred and fifty years (although, in all probability, it will proceed at a rapidly increased ratio),—­I say it will not be so easy to lay your hands on what you want.  The materials, again, will often exist by that time in dead or half-obsolete languages, or at least in languages full of archaic forms.  It will be almost as difficult to unearth and collate the documents which bear upon any events less than the most momentous, as to recover the memorials of Egypt from the pyramids, or of ancient Assyria from the mounds of Nineveh.  The historian of a remote period must be a sort of Belzoni or Layard.  If we can suppose any thing so extravagant as that the British Museum will be in existence then, having preserved during these centuries (as it does now) all new hooks, and accumulated ancient and foreign literature only at the rate it has during these few years past, the library alone will extend over hundreds of acres at least.  This, unless our posterity are fools, can hardly be the case; and therefore much will be rejected and left to the mercy