THE DECLINE AND FALL

39«

chap, boundless annals of time, his life and his laboursmust equally be measured as a fleeting moment.Of a simple and solid edifice, it is not easy, how-ever, to circumscribe the duration. As the won-ders of ancient days, the pyramids 1 attracted thecuriosity of the ancients; an hundred genera-tions, the leaves of autumn, k have dropt into thegrave; and after the fall of the Pharaohs andPtolemies , the Caisars and caliphs, the same py-ramids stand erect and unshaken above thefloods of the Nile . A complex figure, of variousand minute parts, is more accessible to injuryand decay; and the silent lapse of time is ofteninirricanes accelerated by hurricanes and earthquakes, byquaked" fi res a, 'd inundations. The air and earth havedoubtless been shaken ; and the lofty turrets ofRome have tottered from their foundations; butthe seven hills do not appear to be placed on thegreat cavities of the globe; nor has the city, inany age, been exposed to the convulsions of na-ture, which, in the climate of Antioch, Lisbon ,or Lima, have crumbled, in a few moments, theworks of ages into dust. Fire is the most power-ful agent of life and death; the rapid mischiefmay be kindled and propagated by the industryor negligence of mankind; and every period ofthe Roman annals is marked by the repetition

' The age of the pyramids is remote and unknown, since DiodorusSiculus (tom. i, 1. i, c. 44, p.72)is unable to decide whether they wereconstructed 1000 or 3400 years before the 180th Olympiad. Sir JohnMarsham’s contracted scale of the Egyptian dynasties would fix themabove 2000 years before Christ (Canon Chronicus, p. 47.)

* See the speech of Glaucus in the Iliad (vi,146). This natural butmelancholy picture is familiar to Homer .