of the great destroyer.  But the very existence of any such repository is itself a very doubtful supposition.  Comprehensive, indeed, may be the destruction of many large portions of our archives, essentially necessary to minute accuracy at so distant a date; nay, England herself may have ceased to exist.  If her subterranean fuel be not exhausted, a cheaper and equally abundant supply of it may have been found elsewhere, and transfer for ever the chief elements of her manufacturing or commercial prosperity; or entirely new and more transcendent sources of science may have done the same thing, and our country may be left, like a stranded vessel, to rot upon the beach!  Her furnaces extinguished, her manufactories deserted, her cities decayed, the hum of her busy population silenced, she may present a spectacle of desolation like that of so many other famous nations which have risen, culminated, and set for ever.”

“Or,” interrupted I, “(and may God avert the omen!) the same ruin may be accomplished still earlier, and by more potent causes.  Her nobles enervated by luxury, her lower classes sunk in vice and ignorance, and both the one and the other decaying in piety and religion (a sure result of neglecting that Bible which has directly and indirectly formed her strength), she may have fallen a victim to the consequences of her own degeneracy, or to an irresistible combination of the enemies who envy and hate her.  That picture of the splendid imagination of the great historian of our day may be realized, ’when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.’”

“In short,” resumed Harrington, “in several ways that appalling catastrophe may have taken place; and, should this be the case, how many questions will be asked of history, but asked in vain!  As for Rome,—­what other great name in the present strife pitted against England,—­for aught we can tell, she may by that time be in desolation far more remediless than when the grim Attilas and Alarics stormed her walls.  For aught we know, the agency of those terrible elements which more or less mine the soil of Italy may have made her ‘like unto’ Herculaneum or Pompeii; or that silent desolater, the malaria, which Dr. Arnold thinks will be perpetual and will increase, may long before that period have reduced, not only the Campagna of Rome, but the whole region of the ‘seven hills,’ to a pestilential solitude.”

“But all this is mere vision?” said Robinson.

“Certainly; but it is the vision of the possible.  Similarly wonderful and equally unexpected revolutions have taken place in the history of past nations and empires in a less space of time; and some enormous changes, we know, must happen during the next eighteen hundred and fifty years; and they will tend both to jostle out thousands of events of meaner moment, and to effect a comparative destruction of the memorials