Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/43

Rh what all your Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and all your Penny and Saturday Magazines, will never do for yours; it has awakened their intellects, and taught them how to think. The development of the popular mind in Scotland is a result of its theology."

The morning rose quite as gloomily as the evening had fallen: the mist cloud still rested lazily over the town; the rain dashed incessantly from the eaves, and streamed along the pavement. It was miserable weather for an invalid in quest of health; but I had just to make the best I could of the circumstances, by scraping acquaintance with the guests in the travellers' room, and beating with them over all manner of topics, until mid-day, when I sallied out, under cover of an umbrella, to see the town museum. I found it well suited to repay the trouble of a visit; and such is the liberality of the Newcastle people, that it cost me no more. It is superior, both in the extent and arrangement of its geologic department, to any of our Scotch collections with which I am acquainted; and its Anglo-Roman antiquities, from the proximity of the place to the wall of Hadrian, are greatly more numerous than in any other museum I ever saw,—filling, of themselves, an entire gallery. As I passed, in the geologic apartment, from the older Silurian to the newer Tertiary, and then on from the newer Tertiary to the votive tablets, sacrificial altars, and sepulchral memorials of the Anglo-Roman gallery, I could not help regarding them as all belonging to one department. The antiquities piece on in natural sequence to the geology; and it seems but rational to indulge in the same sort of reasonings regarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of things, newer than the Tertiary,—of an extinct race,—of an extinct religion,—of a state of society and a class of enterprises which the world saw once, but which it will never see