survey the whole globe with a view to fixing a seat of universal empire,
all who are capable of making such a choice, would give their
preference to the city of Constantine, as including the great
recommendations of beauty, wealth, security, and eminence. Yet with all
these advantages of situation and climate, and with all the
architectural splendour of its churches and halls, its quarries of
marble, and its treasure-houses of gold, the imperial founder must
himself have learned, that although he could employ all these rich
materials in obedience to his own wish, it was the mind of man itself,
those intellectual faculties refined by the ancients to the highest
degree, which had produced the specimens of talent at which men paused
and wondered, whether as subjects of art or of moral labour. The power
of the Emperor might indeed strip other cities of their statues and
their shrines, in order to decorate that which he had fixed upon as his
new capital; but the men who had performed great actions, and those,
almost equally esteemed, by whom such deeds were celebrated, in poetry,
in painting, and in music, had ceased to exist. The nation, though
still the most civilised in the world, had passed beyond that period of
society, when the desire of fair fame is of itself the sole or chief
motive for the labour of the historian or the poet, the painter or the
statuary. The slavish and despotic constitution introduced into the
empire, had long since entirely destroyed that public spirit which
animated the free history of Rome, leaving nothing but feeble
recollections, which produced no emulation.

To speak as of an animated substance, if Constantine could have
regenerated his new metropolis, by transfusing into it the vital and
vivifying principles of old Rome,--that brilliant spark no longer
remained for Constantinople to borrow, or for Rome to lend.