Buonaroti,--yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself
in gazing upon them, the painful consideration that their having been
painted in 'fresco' was the sole cause that they had not been
abandoned to all the accidents of a dangerous transportation to a
distant capital, and that the same caprice, which made the Neapolitan
soldiery destroy all the exquisite master-pieces on the walls of the
church of the 'Trinitado Monte', after the retreat of their
antagonist barbarians, might as easily have made vanish the rooms and
open gallery of Raffael, and the yet more unapproachable wonders of the
sublime Florentine in the Sixtine Chapel, forced upon my mind the
reflection; How grateful the human race ought to be that the works of
Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakspeare, are not subjected to similar
contingencies,--that they and their fellows, and the great, though
inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured;--secured even from
a second irruption of Goths and Vandals, in addition to many other
safeguards, by the vast empire of English language, laws, and religion
founded in America, through the overflow of the power and the virtue of
my country;-and that now the great and certain works of genuine fame can
only cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or
when the planet on which they exist, shall have altered its relations,
or have ceased to be. Lord Bacon, in the language of the gods, if I may
use an Homeric phrase, has expressed a similar thought:--


Lastly, leaving the vulgar arguments, that by learning man excelleth man
in that wherein man excelleth beasts; that by learning man ascendeth to
the heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot come, and the
like; let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge and
learning in that whereunto man's nature doth most aspire, which is,
immortality or continuance: for to this tendeth generation, and raising