supplied every material want, ministered liberally to every sensuous
enjoyment. Gold and silver, indeed, were not found in the profusion
which has proved so baneful to the industry of lands richer in veins of
the precious metals; but mines and river beds yielded them in the spare
measure most favorable to stability of value in the medium of exchange,
and, consequently, to the regularity of commercial transactions. The
ornaments of the barbaric pride of the East, the pearl, the ruby, the
sapphire, and the diamond--though not unknown to the luxury of a people
whose conquests and whose wealth commanded whatever the habitable world
could contribute to augment the material splendor of their social
life--were scarcely native to the territory of the empire; but the
comparative rarity of these gems in Europe, at somewhat earlier periods,
was, perhaps, the very circumstance that led the cunning artists of
classic antiquity to enrich softer stones with engravings, which invest
the common onyx and cornelian with a worth surpassing, in cultivated
eyes, the lustre of the most brilliant oriental jewels.

Of these manifold blessings the temperature of the air, the distribution
of the rains, the relative disposition of land and water, the plenty of
the sea, the composition of the soil, and the raw material of the
primitive arts, were wholly gratuitous gifts. Yet the spontaneous nature
of Europe, of Western Asia, of Libya, neither fed nor clothed the
civilized inhabitants of those provinces. The luxuriant harvests of
cereals that waved on every field from the shores of the Rhine to the
banks of the Nile, the vines that festooned the hillsides of Syria, of
Italy and of Greece, the olives of Spain, the fruits of the gardens of
the Hesperides, the domestic quadrupeds and fowls known in ancient rural
husbandry--all these were original products of foreign climes,
naturalized in new homes, and gradually ennobled by the art of man,
while centuries of persevering labor were expelling the wild vegetation,