life, and am almost discouraged from further search."

"It seems to me," said Imlac, "that while you are making the choice
of life you neglect to live. You wander about a single city,
which, however large and diversified, can now afford few novelties,
and forget that you are in a country famous among the earliest
monarchies for the power and wisdom of its inhabitants--a country
where the sciences first dawned that illuminate the world, and
beyond which the arts cannot be traced of civil society or domestic
life.

"The old Egyptians have left behind them monuments of industry and
power before which all European magnificence is confessed to fade
away. The ruins of their architecture are the schools of modern
builders; and from the wonders which time has spared we may
conjecture, though uncertainly, what it has destroyed."

"My curiosity," said Rasselas, "does not very strongly lead me to
survey piles of stone or mounds of earth. My business is with man.
I came hither not to measure fragments of temples or trace choked
aqueducts, but to look upon the various scenes of the present
world."

"The things that are now before us," said the Princess, "require
attention, and deserve it. What have I to do with the heroes or
the monuments of ancient times--with times which can never return,
and heroes whose form of life was different from all that the
present condition of mankind requires or allows?"

"To know anything," returned the poet, "we must know its effects;