gay portico succeeded the sullen drawbridge, and to the lively corridor,
a secret passage and a winding staircase.

It is difficult, if not impossible however, to withhold one's respect
from those barbarians who could thus change the face of art, almost of
nature; who could overwhelm courage and counteract learning; who not
only devoured the works of wisdom and the labours of strength, but left
behind them too a settled system of feudatorial life and aristocratic
power, still undestroyed in Europe, though hourly attacked, battered by
commerce, and sapped by civilization.

When Smeathman told us about twelve years ago, how an immense body of
African ants, which appeared, as they moved forwards, like the whole
earth in agitation--covered and suddenly arrested a solemn elephant, as
he grazed unsuspiciously on the plain; he told us too that in eight
hours time no trace was left either of the devasters or devasted,
excepting the skeleton of the noble creature neatly picked; a standing
proof of the power of numbers against single force.

These northern emigrants the Goths, however, have done more; they have
fixed a mode of carrying on human affairs, that I think will never be so
far exterminated as to leave no vestiges behind: and even while one
contemplates the mischief they have made--even while one's pen engraves
one's indignation at their success; the old baron in his castle,
preceded and surrounded by loyal dependants, who desired only to live
under his protection and die in his defence, inspires a notion of
dignity unattainable by those who, seeking the beautiful, are by so far
removed from the sublime of life, and affords to the mind momentary
images of surly magnificence, ill exchanged perhaps by _fancy_, though
_truth_ has happily substituted a succession of soft ideas and social