calm, that through centuries continued to lave, as with the quiet
undulations of summer lakes, the sacred footsteps of the Caesarean throne?
The Byzantine court, which, merely as the inheritor of some fragments from
that august throne, was drunk with excess of pride, surrounded itself with
elaborate expressions of a grandeur beyond what mortal eyes were supposed
able to sustain.

These fastidious, and sometimes fantastic ceremonies, originally devised
as the very extremities of anti-barbarism, were often themselves but too
nearly allied in spirit to the barbaresque in taste. In reality, some
parts of the Byzantine court ritual were arranged in the same spirit as
that of China or the Birman empire; or fashioned by anticipation, as one
might think, on the practice of that Oriental Cham, who daily proclaims by
sound of trumpet to the kings in the four corners of the earth--that they,
having dutifully awaited the close of _his_ dinner, may now with his
royal license go to their own.

From such vestiges of _derivative_ grandeur, propagated to ages so
remote from itself, and sustained by manners so different from the spirit
of her own,--we may faintly measure the strength of the original impulse
given to the feelings of men by the _sacred_ majesty of the Roman
throne. How potent must that splendor have been, whose mere reflection
shot rays upon a distant crown, under another heaven, and across the
wilderness of fourteen centuries! Splendor, thus transmitted, thus
sustained, and thus imperishable, argues a transcendent in the basis of
radical power. Broad and deep must those foundations have been laid, which
could support an "arch of empire" rising to that giddy altitude--an
altitude which sufficed to bring it within the ken of posterity to the
sixtieth generation.