their very sites slipped from the world's
memory. Not long ago, a traveller among
the barren and waterless mountains of Persia
came unexpectedly on a magnificent ruin
standing silent and solitary on a deserted
plain, with polished stone and broken columns
strewing the soil all around. It was the
Tchelminar, the Hall of Pillars, built by the
Genii, said the Arabs, amid the lone deserts
of Merdusht. But history told another tale;
and research made plain to the world that
there stood the long-lost ruins of royal
Persepolis, the city of the Great King—that there
stood all its palaces that had survived the
frenzied torches of Alexander, and the
wasting decay of Time.

Look at the wondrous Valley of the Nile;
and after the desolation of two thousand
years, what do we yet see? A land of ruins!
A mass of monuments, reared by Genius for
eternity; but enduring in their pride and
completeness only while liberty lasted. The
quarries of Silsily teem with sculptors—numerous
and busy as swarming bees—carving out
gigantic monoliths:—Sphinxes, Memnons, and
propyla—from the solid rock. They retire for
the night to resume their labour to-morrow;
but over that morrow bursts the insatiable
Persian. Art, Genius, the whole nation is
suddenly petrified, as if by enchantment. To-
day you—the steam-boat traveller—stand in
those quarries, and believe that the morrow of
two thousand years ago still survives. You
see the marks of the very tools with which
Genius wrought; you behold her works in
various stages; here a rough-hewn Apis, there
a finished Memnon, only awaiting the one last
blow to detach it from its parent rock. The
very tracks of the wheels which had come to
transport the statue to Edfou or to Thebes are
visible. When Cambyses, flushed with victory,
stabbed with his own hand the living sacred bull
Apis, and commanded the bones of the Pharaohs
to be beaten with rods, he struck to the heart
the Genius of the Nile. She could no longer
make her land and her gods glorious with
architecture; for her deities were proscribed,
and her land was the stranger's. The heart
of the nation suddenly ceased to beat. Liberty
was never resuscitated; therefore, Genius
had expired for ever.

Even Rome, the iron mistress of the world,
—the latest and greatest of the universal
monarchies, and which seemed to unite in one
the vitality and power of all her predecessors,
—even her haughty sons drooped on the fall
of the Capitol, on the capture of the Eternal
City, on the uncrowning of the Seven-Hilled
Queen by the barbarians of the North. Two
thousand marble statues, and palaces not less
beautiful than countless, stood in her streets,
—on that dread night, when the Gothic
trumpet rang through the slumbering city,
her sons started from their effeminate couches
only to find themselves slaves. That was
the last hour of the old Roman Art. No
more statues were chiselled, no more
palatial edifices built. The Goth ruled in
the Capitol, and Genius forsook her old
shrines.

As foreign thraldom extinguishes genius
in a country, social slavery smothers genius
in the individual, and where there is no breath,
there can be no aspirations. The system of
caste—which divides a people into sections
and different ranks, sternly restricting each to
station and pursuit—has at some period or
other existed more or less stringently in all
parts of the world. In the early dawn of
civilisation, such a system, viewed in regard to Art
alone, was indeed advantageous. Printing was
then unknown, and letters were a mystery. The
interchange of ideas and news, which now
permeates every corner of society, had then no
existence. No one knew what was going on
except in his immediate neighbourhood. In
such circumstances, the system of caste was
the most likely to obviate the impediments to
the preservation and propagation of
knowledge in the arts: for the discoveries made by
the fathers were thus transmitted directly to
their children; and the spread of improvements
was comparatively easy among a class,
all of whose members were bound together by
community of station and employment. But
when knowledge is easy of communication, the
system becomes pernicious. Knowledge is the
life-blood of Genius, and must, when it can,
be spread and circulated. When confined to
caste of station, Genius droops for the want of
it. Genius is aspiring, but caste chains it
immovably to one station. Genius is impulse,
action; it cannot move in fetters. Pent up
within the walls of conventional rank,
Genius collapses,—her inspirations can only be
drawn from the atmospheres of boundless
liberty.

Conquest and tyranny must ever be short-
lived. A free state always, in the end, lives
down a despotism. The latter derives talent
from one class only, while in the former it
leaps up from all. Even when Liberty is
born in blood and nursed on carnage, she is
the foster child of Genius. The extraordinary
development of talent by France during her
first Revolution, has no parallel among the
then despotic powers of the Continent.
Though the strife was horrible and
sanguinary, it summoned every man in France
to exertion; while the path to the guillotine
was trodden smooth by victims, it threw open
the road to honour, and thousands entered.
The man who raised himself from subaltern
of artillery to the Imperial throne; who
beheld the half of Europe beneath the shadow
of his sceptre; who wedded the daughter
of the Cæsars, and raised around his throne
a martial galaxy unparalleled in the world's
history—was the offspring of Liberty; of gory
Liberty; such Liberty as makes Genius shine
forth with preternatural lustre—but only
develops it in a few at the expense of the
happiness of the many.

Happily, here in England, she sheds her