Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/497

Rh at a sufficient interval and with altered mood, we review such instances of the mockery of fate, we can scarcely refrain from a melancholy smile. And such, we conceive, though without any of the feelings that sometimes sadden our retrospect, must have been the look which a superior intelligence, exempt from our passions, and capable of surveying all our relations, and foreseeing the consequences of all our actions, would at the time have cast upon the tumultuous workings of our blind ambition and our groundless apprehensions, upon the phantoms we raised to chase us, or to be chased, while the substance of good and evil presented itself to our view, and was utterly disregarded.

But it is not only in the lives of individuals that man's shortsighted impatience and temerity are thus tacitly rebuked by the course of events: examples still more striking are furnished by the history of states and institutions. The moment of the highest prosperity is often that which immediately precedes the most ruinous disaster, and (as in the case not only of a Xerxes, a Charles the Bold, a Philip the second, and a Napoleon, but of Athens, and Sparta, and Carthage, and Venice,) it is the sense of security that constitutes the danger, it is the consciousness of power and the desire of exerting it that causes the downfall. It is not however these sudden and signal reverses, the fruit of overweening arrogance and insatiable ambition, that we have here principally to observe: but rather an universal law, which manifests itself, no less in the moral world than in the physical, according to which the period of inward languor, corruption, and decay, which follows that of maturity, presents an aspect more dazzling and commanding, and to those who look only at the surface inspires greater confidence and respect, than the season of youthful health, of growing but unripened strength. The power of the Persians was most truly formidable when they first issued from their comparatively narrow territory to overspread Asia with their arms. But at what epoch in their history does the Great King appear invested with such majesty, as when he dictated the peace of Antaleidas to the Greeks! And yet at this very time the throne on which he sate with so lofty a port, was so insecurely based, that a slight